TOLEDO, Ohio — Lucas County’s year-old conviction integrity unit has reached its first major development: securing a new trial hearing for a man convicted of raping his young daughter.
Joel Terry, sentenced to life in prison in 2019 for repeatedly abusing his daughter, will get an evidentiary hearing Sept. 25 before Common Pleas Judge Lindsay Navarre. The hearing represents the first tangible result of the county’s new program designed to investigate claims of innocence by imprisoned individuals.
The conviction integrity unit’s review of Terry’s case produced one and possibly two significant pieces of evidence that his original defense team didn’t have access to during his 2019 trial.
New DNA testing
The most compelling evidence came from specialized DNA testing performed by Cybergenetics Inc. in Pittsburgh. At Terry’s original trial, prosecutors knew there was a mixture of the girl’s DNA and an unknown male’s DNA in her underwear. Standard testing couldn’t exclude Terry as a contributor, and prosecutors argued the DNA could be his throughout trial and in their closing statement…