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Julius Ruffin

Other Virginia DNA Exonerations
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In 2003, more than two decades after being sent to prison, DNA testing exonerated Julius Ruffin. Ruffin had been found guilty of rape and sodomy. He was sentenced to life in a Virginia prison after two previous hung juries.
 
The victim, a young nurse, was assaulted and raped after the assailant broke into her apartment. Weeks after the attack, Ruffin walked into an elevator at the medical school where he was a maintenance worker and the victim a nursing student. She promptly called the police and identified Ruffin as the attacker.
 
Ruffin's girlfriend testified that he was with her at the time of the rape, but the victim said she was certain that Ruffin was the assailant. Scientific testing on semen done at the trial was linked to a group that contained only 8% of all African American men. After two juries could not reach a unanimous verdict, the third found Ruffin guilty.
 
As in the case of Marvin Anderson, Mary Jane Burton, a state forensic scientist, had kept bits of Ruffin's evidence in her laboratory notebook. Though this went against laboratory protocol, her anomalous behavior provided the evidence of Ruffin's innocence.
 
In 2003, DNA testing was performed on the swab sample. Not only was Ruffin excluded, but another incarcerated man, Aaron Doxie III, who was in prison for rape, was linked to the sample. Doxie was also eventually linked by DNA to a rape for which another man, Arthur Whitfield, was wrongly convited.
 
Over the next two years, three more defendants in Virginia were exonerated by DNA testing performed on biological material from rape kit swabs and pieces of cloth preserved in Burton's files. In 2005, then-Governor Mark Warner ordered testing of biological evidence from 1973 through 1988 that could be found in Burton’s files.
 
The Virginia Legislature approved $1.225 million in compensation for Ruffin.
 
By the end of 2013, Anderson, Ruffin and nine other men–Curtis Moore, Victor Burnette, Arthur Whitfield, Willie Davidson, Philip Thurman, Thomas Haynesworth, Calvin Wayne Cunningham, Bennett Barbour, and Garry Diamond–had been exonerated as a result of the testing of evidence in Burton's files.

In 2018, Roy Watford III became the 12th person to be exonerated by DNA testing of evidence in Burton’s files. In 2019, Winston Scott became the 13th person exonerated by DNA evidence retained in Burton’s files.
 
Summary courtesy of the Innocence Project, http://www.innocenceproject.org/. Reproduced with permission.

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Posting Date:  Before June 2012
Last Updated: 3/8/2019
State:Virginia
County:Norfolk City
Most Serious Crime:Sexual Assault
Additional Convictions:
Reported Crime Date:1981
Convicted:1982
Exonerated:2003
Sentence:Life
Race/Ethnicity:Black
Sex:Male
Age at the date of reported crime:28
Contributing Factors:Mistaken Witness ID
Did DNA evidence contribute to the exoneration?:Yes