Cold-hit DNA match leads to execution in Virginia
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RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia, the first state to execute a criminal convicted on DNA evidence, is preparing for what is believed to be the first execution in the nation based on a "cold-hit" DNA test.
James Earl Patterson is to be put to death by injection Thursday for a 1987 rape and murder.
He was fingered when the state compared DNA samples from the crime with DNA samples in its database of 175,000 inmates.
A "cold hit" matched the DNA of Patterson, who was serving a prison sentence for another rape and has been behind bars nearly 14 years.
Without the cold hit, Patterson, 35, would have been released in 2004.
An Associated Press survey of the 37 other states with the death penalty turned up no previous cases of a cold-hit execution. The Death Penalty Information Center in Washington said it was unaware of such a case.
Virginia is far ahead of other states when it comes to using DNA to solve crimes. It became the first state to execute a man convicted through DNA evidence when Timothy Spencer went to the electric chair in 1993 for a series of stranglings in Richmond.
Its DNA-felon database, established in 1989, makes up about 20 percent of the national database, more than any other state, said Paul Ferrara, director of the state Division of Forensic Science.
After the 1999 DNA cold hit, Patterson confessed and pleaded guilty to raping, sodomizing and stabbing Joyce Aldridge in her Prince George County home on Oct. 11, 1987.
He asked to be sentenced to death and has dropped all his appeals.
"The penalty fit the crime," he said in a telephone interview from Death Row at Sussex State Prison. "I was responsible and I want to pay the ultimate price."
Patterson killed Aldridge when he was 20, a time he said he was heavily into drugs and alcohol. But he said he blames no one but himself because his parents tried to point him in the right direction.
"I don't even blame the drugs," he said. "The trail that I was on was self-inflicted."
Since 1982, the state has carried out 83 executions, second only to Texas.