A red hat with the victim’s blood and the defendant’s sweat was key to the prosecution’s case against Kareem Johnson. Mr. Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death; he spent the next 9 years of his life on death row. Then, his defense team gained access to the original DNA report and learned that the red hat had no blood on it at all! The Prosecutor claimed that he (along with the lead investigators) “misread the report” and then made a series of “mistakes,” but such a series of calamitous errors seems unlikely. ACCR’s brief urges the Supreme Court to recognize the prosecution’s abhorrent misconduct as intentional and bar retrial for Mr. Johnson on double jeopardy grounds.
