Maryland’s highest court has ordered prosecutors to keep looking for DNA evidence that may not exist in the case of a former D.C. prison guard who was sentenced to life imprisonment for rape 26 years ago.
The Maryland Court of Appeals, voting 4-3, overruled a decision by a Montgomery County circuit judge who had said the court already had “bent over backwards” to help Tyrone Horton, the convicted rapist, try to find evidence that prosecutors said had been destroyed.
Horton was sentenced in 1983 to life in prison for raping a woman in her Rockville home the previous year. At that time, DNA testing was not a regular fixture of the criminal justice system.
The victim said Horton followed her from a nightclub downtown to her home, where he beat her unconscious, stripped her and raped her, according to a Washington Post account.
The evidence Horton’s lawyer is seeking includes the victim’s rape kit, her clothes, and hair and blood samples taken from her home. A police notice shows that the evidence was approved to be destroyed in 1986, court records show.
Court records also show that recent searches of the police department’s crime lab and Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, where the victim was treated, turned up nothing.
But Horton’s attorney, Seth Tucker, said there were more places left to search, including the hospital’s microbiology department, which may have kept records of a test for sexually transmitted diseases performed on the victim shortly after she was raped.
“The search was pretty good, but pretty good is not the standard here, the standard has to be better than that,” Tucker said.
Horton, who had worked for the District of Columbia’s corrections department before becoming a cab driver at the time of the rape, has always maintained his innocence, Tucker said. His appeal directly following his conviction failed, and in 2006 he petitioned for DNA testing of the evidence in his case.
Deputy State’s Attorney John Maloney said the Court of Appeals’ ruling wouldn’t change the fact that the evidence had been destroyed and wouldn’t change the outcome of Horton’s conviction.
“At the end of the day, nothing will be different,” he said.
