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Just days before he was supposed to try out as a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers in 1981, a talented 21-year-old ballplayer was arrested on murder charges in Florida.
William Dillon, now 53, was convicted of the crime. He purportedly showed up at the beach where the body was found, despite a reliable alibi. It didn’t help that an inmate, in a ruse to shave time off his own sentence, lied and said that Dillon confessed the murder to him while awaiting his trial.
After serving 27 years behind bars, Dillon was exonerated of the crime and set free with the help of DNA technology and the Innocence Project.
Despite it all, Dillon, a musician who plays in a band with fellow exonerated convicts, sang the creed to freedom with his own rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at a Tampa Bay Devil Rays game in 2012. Oddee online report ‘10 of the Worst Wrongful Imprisonment Cases’
On 8 June 2012 Bruce Fischer of Ground Report said ‘The Damage Caused By Wrongful Convictions Is Not Repaired By Exoneration Alone’.
William ‘Bill’ Dillon was wrongfully convicted in Florida for the murder of forty-year-old James Dvorak in 1981. It would take over twenty-seven years for Dillon to clear his name. The prosecution secured the conviction based on a bloody shirt found at the crime scene and testimony provided by John Preston and his ‘scent-tracking’ German Shepherd.
Preston testified in over 100 trials, convincing juries that his dogs had the capability of tracking human scent, no matter what the circumstances. He was able to convince a jury that his dog picked up Dillon’s scent outdoors, eight days after the murder in an area where a hurricane had just blown through. Preston had testified in previous trials that his dogs could track scent under water.
Thankfully Preston was exposed by a Florida judge in 1984. The judge questioned the abilities of Preston’s dogs and set up a test to see one of his dogs in action. The dog failed the judge’s test leading the judge to conclude that Preston’s dogs were only successful when coached in advance. Unfortunately Preston’s demise came too late to be of any help to Bill Dillon.
As it turns out, the bloody shirt used as evidence against Dillon in 1981, would be the same evidence used to set him free in 2008, thanks to DNA technology not available at the time of his conviction. DNA recovered from the shirt proved that Dillon had absolutely nothing to do with the crime. Dillon walked out of prison in 2008 to a world that he had not seen in nearly three decades. His exoneration did not put an end to the hardship caused by his wrongful conviction. Networked Knowledge online article