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Steven Linscott

Other Chicago DNA Exonerations
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On October 4, 1980, 24-year-old Karen Phillips was found dead in her Oak Park, Illinois apartment.  She had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death.

Coincidentally, Steven Linscott, a Bible study student and neighbor of Phillips, had a dream that same night in which he saw a woman beaten to death.  Friends and family suggested that Linscott share details of his dream with local authorities and, two days after the murder, Linscott contacted the police in the hope that his dream might help them identify the killer of Karen Phillips.  At the direction of the police, he provided both written and recorded statements of his dream, as well as hair, blood, and saliva samples. Although there were relatively few similarities and several striking dissimilarities between the dream and the crime, police interpreted his dream as a “confession” and Linscott quickly became the sole suspect in the murder case.
 
Linscott was arrested on November 25, 1980, and charged with murder and rape. At his 1982 trial, prosecutors claimed that semen recovered from Phillips could have come only from a man with Linscott’s relatively rare blood type, although in fact the semen could have come from a sizeable majority of the male population.  A state forensic scientist testified that several hairs found on the victim’s body, bed, and carpet were consistent with Linscott’s hair and that a hair found on the murder weapon, a tire iron, was consistent with Phillips's hair. The defense called an expert witness, Kenneth Siegesmund, an Associate Professor of Anatomy at Medical College in Milwaukee with expertise in “microevidence,” including hair. In addition to the microscopic observations used in conventional MHCA, Siegesmund did higher-tech analyses using a scanning electron microscope and x-ray elemental micro-analysis. Based on all three analyses, he excluded Linscott as the source of the hair.  On June 16, the jury found Linscott not guilty of rape, but guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison by Cook County Circuit Court Judge Adam N. Stillo.
 
On August 7, 1985, the Illinois Appellate Court reversed Linscott’s conviction based on prosecutors’ false statements to the jury.  Although the prosecution appealed, Linscott was released on bond.  The following year, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Appellate Court and remanded the case to that court for review of issues that were not  decided on appeal, specifically testing of the hair samples.
 
On July 29, 1987, the Illinois Appellate Court again reversed Linscott’s conviction, based on prosecutorial misconduct. The prosecution sought another appeal.

While that was pending, Linscott's lawyers, Thomas Decker and Richard McLeese filed a motion for a new trial contending that a re-examination of the evidence showed that what had been identified as abrasions on Phillips's body were actually bitemarks. At a hearing, the defense lawyers presented evidence that an odontologist believed that the marks could not have been made by Linscott's teeth. The motion was denied in 1990.

On January 31, 1991, the Supreme Court affirmed the Appellate Court’s decision, setting the stage for a retrial.  In preparation for the new trial, the prosecution conducted  DNA tests on the crime-scene evidence.  The testing revealed that the semen found in the victim was not from Linscott. 
 
After three years in jail and seven years on bond, all charges against Linscott were dismissed on July 16, 1992. A decade later, in December 2002, Linscott received a pardon based on innocence from Governor George Ryan, which entitled him to $60,150 in compensation from the state.
 
— Rob Warden

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Posting Date:  Before June 2012
Last Updated: 5/2/2022
State:Illinois
County:Cook
Most Serious Crime:Murder
Additional Convictions:
Reported Crime Date:1980
Convicted:1982
Exonerated:1992
Sentence:40 years
Race/Ethnicity:White
Sex:Male
Age at the date of reported crime:26
Contributing Factors:False Confession, False or Misleading Forensic Evidence, Official Misconduct
Did DNA evidence contribute to the exoneration?:Yes