Danny Davis spent more than 32 years in prison for a 1992 murder in Cairo, Illinois. On November 12, 2025, a court in Alexander County dismissed the charges against him, one year to the day after he walked out of prison, the Innocence Project reported. Testing of male DNA found under the victim's fingernails had excluded Davis, his brother and a third man who had been accused.
Davis was 20 when he signed a confession after hours of questioning. He later pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty. "I just want to live. That's the only reason I'm pleading to it," he told the court, according to the Innocence Project. Prosecutors moved to dismiss all charges, said the Exoneration Project, which helped represent him. "Today is a long time coming for Danny," said his attorney Lauren Myerscough-Mueller.
How DNA reaches a courtroom
In most cases, DNA evidence works by comparison. Analysts develop a profile from biological material left at a scene and compare it with a sample from a known person or with profiles stored in a database.
The main database is the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS. It began as a pilot in 1990 and works in three tiers, local, state and national, according to a Justice Department Inspector General audit. Profiles from crime scenes are checked against profiles from convicted offenders to link a person to a crime, link crimes to each other or identify missing people. The national level has been running since 1998.
A match identifies who left the material. It does not always explain how it got there. In the Idaho student killings, single source DNA on a knife sheath matched Bryan Kohberger, who pleaded guilty in 2025 in a deal that spared him the death penalty. Boise DNA expert Greg Hampikian, who said he does not dispute Kohberger's guilt, told KIVI that "What we can't tell is how the DNA got there." Kohberger's defense had spent years trying to keep out evidence developed through investigative genetic genealogy, which pointed investigators to him.
The exoneration record
DNA has been most powerful as a tool for proving innocence. According to the Innocence Project, citing the National Registry of Exonerations, 614 people have been exonerated based on DNA testing since 1989. DNA has cleared 38 people who were on death row. The first was Kirk Bloodsworth, who spent nearly nine years wrongly locked up.
The group's study of its first 375 DNA exonerations shows what went wrong in those cases. Mistaken eyewitness identification played a role in 69 percent. Misapplied forensic science was a factor in 43 percent, and false confessions in 29 percent. The people in those cases served an average of 14 years. In 180 of them, the real perpetrator was later identified.
Davis fits a familiar pattern. His case turned on a confession that DNA later contradicted.
Getting a test is not automatic
Every state now has a law allowing post conviction DNA testing, but the Innocence Project says many are so narrow that few prisoners qualify. Alabama limits testing to people charged with a capital offense. Kentucky bars people who pleaded guilty, even when they say they were coerced. Testing in one case can cost $5,000 to $50,000. And attackers leave DNA in fewer than 10 percent of murders, so many wrongful conviction claims have nothing to test.
Federal prisoners have their own route. Under 18 U.S.C. 3600, a prisoner must swear to actual innocence under penalty of perjury, and the evidence must still be in government hands with a documented chain of custody. If the results exclude the prisoner, a judge grants a new trial only if the results, weighed with all the other evidence, provide "compelling evidence" that a new trial would end in acquittal.
Daniel Rosenberg and his daughter Olivia touched on wrongful convictions, the Innocence Project and how DNA changed investigations in Episode 77, as our recap of that conversation explains. How forensic evidence holds up under cross examination is the kind of question the Two Taps legal panel takes apart on the show.
This article is general information about how the law works, not legal advice.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
