PLACERVILLE, Calif. — An El Dorado County judge granted an order Friday vacating a woman’s 2005 manslaughter guilty plea.
According to the El Dorado County District Attorney's Office, Connie Dahl was charged with Ricky Davis for the 1985 murder of Jane Hylton. Prosecutors say she was aggressively questioned and falsely confessed Davis committed murder while she was a lookout.
Dahl received three years of probation while Davis was sentenced to 16 years to life in prison.
Prosecutors say the convictions were based on outdated methods of questioning based on pseudoscience.
The district attorney’s office reviewed the case and found DNA evidence contradicting Dahl’s confession. It led to prosecutors finding the real killer, Michael Green. Dahl died in 2014 before the truth came out.
The Los Angeles Times reports Davis was also exonerated in 2020, making him the first person to be exonerated by genetic genealogy, or the use of family trees to track down an identity from unknown DNA.
“Connie Dahl was innocent all along, and we hope this exoneration will give some comfort to her family,” said El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson. “The highest priority of law enforcement is safeguarding the life, dignity, and liberty of all persons, without prejudice to anyone,” said Pierson. "There has been an urban myth within policing for decades that the only way to obtain information is to use interviewing tactics that employ pseudoscience and psychological coercion, and that urban myth is finally being debunked.”
The district attorney's office says DA Pierson began hosting rapport-based interview trainings for law enforcement agencies in California and U.S. Prosecutors say that technique is based on science and they hope one day science-based interviewing will replace a system still widely used.
California’s Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) announced it’s mandating science-based interviewing, meaning the number of officers employing the techniques is expanding.
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