The prosecutor publicly will not comment on specifics, and the last time she spoke, she insisted that there is an "ongoing investigation."
R-i-i-ght.
The prosecution in court filings points to the fact that in the original witness testimony of the 6-year-old son of the victim the child first said there was one and then there were two assailants. This before switching back once again to seeing one killer.
The prosecution was quite happy with one assailant when it fit their case back in 1982, but now that DNA shows another man raped the victim, they want to go back to the once-discarded two-killer theory. Of course, the fact that the child's testimony was full of holes and impossibilities means nothing to the prosecutor now - just the fact that there might have been two killers is enough for them, since that means Danny cannot be excluded.
However, neither can 3 billion other males on the planet, since there is no physical evidence linking them to the crime. Hell, throw the planet's 3 billion women in, too: since the rape was committed by a known murderer-rapist (Sherman Preston), his "accomplice" could have been just about any human being, since apparently evidence no longer needs to be used to consider someone a suspect.
The prosecutor knows that the DNA matches Sherman Preston, a criminal serving 20-to-life on a similar rape-murder. However, since Preston does not come up for parole until 2013, they are in no hurry to do anything. They refuse to give Danny Brown a new trial - the trial to which he is entitled as a condition of his 2001 release - because they have absolutely no case.
No physical evidence. 13 witnesses who put Danny on the other side of the town at the time of the murder. Polygraphs that Danny passed (of course, the cops only want to use polygraphs when they work against suspects).
Yet because a confused 6-year-old boy thought at one point he saw two men the night his mother was murdered, Danny Brown remains a suspect. Forget the fact that the boy said he saw his mother stabbed (she was actually strangled), or that while he said he was under his bed he supposedly saw violent events in another room, or that the point at which he claimed he saw Danny would have been obscured by a concrete awning.
This case was so bad in 1982 that they offered Danny a plea deal of 1-10 years for involuntary manslaughter, which he turned down.
Because he is an innocent man, and because he naively believed that the justice system works. Heck, if he had taken that deal, he might have gotten out in 1984 or 1986, though with a felony conviction.
Ultimately, it will take someone with some political muscle to force this case out into the open. Since we have an all-Democratic administration, it may have to wait, since I can't see a Democratic pol turning on one of their own (Julia Bates). I told Danny he would be better off trying to get the Republicans interested than he would be to write his Democratic representatives.
Oh, and those Democratic weasels? I wrote a bunch of letters to state reps from the area, and never heard a single word back: not even a "thanks for writing, and remember me in November" form letter. While I am a political independent, I have to say that every one of these reps was a Democrat (Edna Brown and Teresa Fedor deserve special un-thanks, since he lived in their districts).
I guess there is no hay to be made if the political opponent is on the same team.