State Sen. Ernie Chambers said he had to restrain himself from whooping with joy.

Wednesday morning, Saline County District Judge Vicky Johnson ordered a new trial for 45-year-old Joseph White and a new sentence for 42-year-old Thomas Winslow after DNA tests revealed that they did not rape Helen Wilson, a Beatrice woman who was raped and murdered in 1985.

Both White and Winslow had been in prison since 1990 for convictions relating to those crimes.

Chambers introduced the legislation that made it possible for White and Winslow to request that DNA found in Wilson’s apartment and preserved by Beatrice police be tested.

That legislation passed eight years ago. But until Wednesday morning, when White was released on his own recognizance, no one had been freed from a Nebraska prison as a result.

It felt good to have a role in that, said Chambers, who said he strongly believed both men to be innocent.

“This was the purpose to be served by this legislation,” he said.

Nebraska is one of 43 states that have laws allowing for inmates to request DNA evidence be tested, said Eric Ferrero, communications director of the New York-based Innocence Project, a non-profit that works to exonerate the wrongly convicted through DNA testing.

The first DNA exonerations occurred in 1989, Ferrero said, in Illinois and Virginia.

In the mid- and late-1990s, states began to pass laws putting in place procedures for DNA tests that could lead to exonerations. Nebraska’s law came at a time when many states were passing DNA testing laws, he said.

Nebraska, along with about half of the other states, also has an evidence preservation law, Ferrero said.

“Having the right to DNA testing doesn’t mean much if the evidence hasn’t been saved,” Ferrero said.

To date, Ferrero said, 222 people in 32 states have been exonerated using DNA evidence.

White, it appears, will likely be the first person convicted in Nebraska to officially be exonerated because of DNA evidence;  his lawyer, Doug Stratton, said Wednesday that he doubted White will ever be retried.

White maintained his innocence at his trial in 1989 and ever since.

Winslow won’t be exonerated, per se, because he pleaded no contest to aiding and abetting second-degree murder, though he has said he has no memory of being inside Wilson’s apartment. Rather, it is possible he will have his sentence reduced to time served during his re-sentencing on Friday.

If both men do end up free, they likely have a difficult road ahead, Ferrero said.

Nebraska does not have a compensation law, which requires that the state pay wrongly convicted inmates a sum of money for every year of prison time served, Ferrero said. The federal government recommends that amount be $50,000 a year, he said.

That money is necessary just to transition back to society, he said.

“Our experience with our clients is that they come out of prison and have no money, no job, nowhere to live, often very limited family support or social network,”  he said.

White and Winslow are lucky to have supportive families, Chambers said.

And while Chambers was thrilled with Wednesday’s ruling, he said he regrets the men spent so much time in prison.

Still, for some wrongly convicted inmates, even DNA offers no promise of freedom, he said. 

When law enforcement officers investigate a crime scene, they don’t pick up every single hair, every fingernail clipping, every eyelash, like investigators do on television, Chambers said.

Rather, he said, they look for blood, saliva, semen and other fluids. Unless those substances are present at the crime scene, DNA testing won’t work.

“It will work only when there is biological evidence at the crime scene,” he said, “and in many cases, there won’t be.”

Reach Cara Pesek at 473-7361 or cpesek@journalstar.com.