Advanced forensic testing could yield new information in the 1991 death of William Little, a defense expert argued Thursday in the evidentiary hearing for Jamie Snow, who is challenging his conviction on murder charges in connection with the armed robbery that killed Little.
Snow was convicted in 2001 of killing Little during an Easter Sunday robbery of a Bloomington gas station where Little worked as an attendant.
The evidentiary hearing came more than two decades after Snow first sought DNA testing in his bid to clear his name. Since that time, Snow’s lawyers discovered more than 8,000 pages of police reports, including previously undisclosed information about potential alternate suspects. The reports were turned over by the state as part of a defense subpoena.
In his opening remarks Thursday, defense lawyer Karl Leonard with The Exoneration Project argued that Snow, now 57, is entitled to the DNA testing.
Snow’s conviction lacked any ties to physical evidence, said Leonard, and was based largely on the testimony of several informants whose testimony has been recanted or discredited. The results of DNA testing “could point to the true perpetrator of the crime,” Leonard told Associate Judge Kevin Tippey, a Schuyler County judge appointed to hear the case because of judicial conflicts in the 11th Judicial Circuit.
First Assistant State’s Attorney Brad Rigdon said the state does not believe that the DNA testing would “generate new evidence that is noncumulative and materially relevant” to Snow’s innocence claim.
Deanna Lankford, a DNA analyst with Bode Cellmark Forensics, testified that new and more robust testing methods allow for examination of miniscule DNA samples that can detect a second or third contributor to a sample.
Lankford recommended DNA testing on eight fingerprints collected from the door of the gas station, the victim’s clothing and two bullets removed from the victim’s body. A swab used to collect a blood stain from the floor is also worth checking for DNA, said the analyst.
“There’s the potential for obtaining DNA profiles that would be pertinent to your case,” Lankford said in response to questions from Exoneration Project lawyer Lauren Myerscough-Mueller.
A second defense expert recommended that the prints collected from the door of the gas station be examined using today’s technology.
Matthew Marvin, with Ron Smith and Associates, a private lab, said all of the 21 fingerprints collected by police from the business, including seven found suitable for testing, should be reevaluated. Modern lab procedures could determine if additional fingerprints are suitable for submission to a national database maintained by the FBI.
Robert Reneau, a latent fingerprint examiner with the Illinois State Police crime lab, reviewed the fingerprints reports from Snow’s case. He said of the seven prints suitable for comparison, two matched the victim and five others produced no match to Snow. One print was submitted to a database of Illinois individuals convicted of crimes, but no documentation was created on the results of that comparison.
The prints from the Little investigation were returned to Bloomington in 2016 when state police cleared its inventory of unknown prints, said Reneau. Prints from the armed robbery were never compared to the FBI database now containing close to 100 million prints from criminal cases and background checks, he said.
The judge took the case under advisement.
