Cleared by DNA

For most of the twentieth century a confession or a bite-mark comparison could send someone to prison for life. DNA profiling, refined from the mid-1980s on, gave courts a way to test those verdicts against physical evidence. In case after case, the evidence did not match the person who had been convicted.

Each file here turned on that test. Some people were freed only after decades: Peter Sullivan served 38 years in England before DNA cleared him in 2025; Sean Hodgson served 27. In others — Cardiff, Ashikaga, Hwaseong — the same science that exonerated one person eventually pointed to another.

These are not stories of clever detection. They are records of what it costs when a system is certain and wrong, and of the narrow, technical margin by which the record was finally corrected.