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Advocates for a former U.S. soldier convicted of the attempted rape and murder of an Army officer's son 37 years ago are asking a federal judge to order DNA testing to discredit what they say is weak evidence presented at a court-martial that sent him to prison for life.
The Hawaii Innocence Project filed a motion Friday seeking DNA testing of a bite mark and a hair that the military said tied Clifford Hubbard, who was originally from Texas, to the 1982 attempted sodomy and bare-handed suffocation of 14-year-old Derek Kusumoto at Schofield Barracks, a Hawaii base.
Investigators collected various pieces of physical evidence from the crime scene, including the boy's socks and a shirt cut from his body, that could be tested, the motion said.
Hubbard's conviction didn't only rely on weak physical evidence, said Kenneth Lawson, co-director of the Hawaii Innocence Project. The military's key witness in the case also changed his statement six times, and then went AWOL before the trial started and was later found dead in an Ohio prison. The military judge allowed the statements to be read at trial even though the soldier, Joseph Courtney, wasn't around to testify.
In their motion seeking DNA testing that was not available in the 1980s, lawyers say there's no direct evidence linking Hubbard to the death of Lt. Col. Howard Kusumoto's adopted son, whose bruised and partially nude body was found in a bunker at the base outside Honolulu.
"There's no doubt there was a rush to judgment because it was a high ranking officer's child that was killed," Lawson said. "We don't know who did it. The only thing we know is who didn't do it."
A spokeswoman for U.S. Army Hawaii referred The Associated Press to the Army Criminal Investigation Command in Virginia to comment on the motion. A spokesman didn't immediately respond to messages left Friday, when it was already after-hours in Virginia.
Hubbard exhausted appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, losing mostly on technical issues, not the merits of his case, Lawson said. The project claims in the court filing that a judge may order DNA testing "if it may produce new material evidence that the applicant did not commit the offense."
For years, Hubbard has implored the Innocence Project from his Florida prison cell.
Since he can't afford writing paper, his letters are hand-written on brown bags, scraps of magazine pages and even toilet paper. In one of his brown-bag letters from 2017, Hubbard wrote about trading a cookie and a meat patty for five stamps.
The Innocence Project is also asking for a hearing to determine what evidence the military has preserved in the case, and to move Hubbard to a federal detention center in Honolulu so the lawyers and students at Hawaii's only law school can communicate with him more easily.
Ex-soldier serving life for teen's '82 murder seeks DNA test
The Hawaii Innocence Project filed a motion Friday seeking DNA testing of a bite mark and a hair that the military said tied Clifford Hubbard, who was originally from Texas, to the 1982 attempted sodomy and bare-handed suffocation of 14-year-old Derek Kusumoto at Schofield Barracks, a Hawaii base.
Investigators collected various pieces of physical evidence from the crime scene, including the boy's socks and a shirt cut from his body, that could be tested, the motion said.
Hubbard's conviction didn't only rely on weak physical evidence, said Kenneth Lawson, co-director of the Hawaii Innocence Project. The military's key witness in the case also changed his statement six times, and then went AWOL before the trial started and was later found dead in an Ohio prison. The military judge allowed the statements to be read at trial even though the soldier, Joseph Courtney, wasn't around to testify.
In their motion seeking DNA testing that was not available in the 1980s, lawyers say there's no direct evidence linking Hubbard to the death of Lt. Col. Howard Kusumoto's adopted son, whose bruised and partially nude body was found in a bunker at the base outside Honolulu.
"There's no doubt there was a rush to judgment because it was a high ranking officer's child that was killed," Lawson said. "We don't know who did it. The only thing we know is who didn't do it."
A spokeswoman for U.S. Army Hawaii referred The Associated Press to the Army Criminal Investigation Command in Virginia to comment on the motion. A spokesman didn't immediately respond to messages left Friday, when it was already after-hours in Virginia.
Hubbard exhausted appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, losing mostly on technical issues, not the merits of his case, Lawson said. The project claims in the court filing that a judge may order DNA testing "if it may produce new material evidence that the applicant did not commit the offense."
For years, Hubbard has implored the Innocence Project from his Florida prison cell.
Since he can't afford writing paper, his letters are hand-written on brown bags, scraps of magazine pages and even toilet paper. In one of his brown-bag letters from 2017, Hubbard wrote about trading a cookie and a meat patty for five stamps.
The Innocence Project is also asking for a hearing to determine what evidence the military has preserved in the case, and to move Hubbard to a federal detention center in Honolulu so the lawyers and students at Hawaii's only law school can communicate with him more easily.
Ex-soldier serving life for teen's '82 murder seeks DNA test
