Their teeth led them to jail one day being innocent and DNA analysis gave them back their freedom, but not the life that an unjust sentence took from them.

The story of Robert Duboise, who this Thursday left an American prison after spending more than 37 years behind bars accused of raping and killing a 19-year-old girl in Tampa, Florida, recalls that of Ray Krone, who spent 10 years in the Arizona state jail and two more on death row, charged with kidnapping and murder he never committed. And all because the bite marks presented by the victim (a waitress at an Arizona bar she used to go to play darts) apparently matched the ones that would make her teeth.

In Duboise's case, the only physical evidence that found him guilty was an alleged bite on the victim's face that, according to one expert, matched his own. An error that has separated him from life in freedom for 37 years and now returns him to a world that is nothing like the one he left behind. He entered prison at the age of 18 and is leaving at 55 after finding samples this month that were believed to have been lost since 1983 and which have allowed, after checking with his DNA, to declare him innocent .

Despite apologies this week from the Hillsborough State Attorney "on behalf of the entire judicial system," nothing and no one will be able to give Duboise back lost time. But he prefers not to drown in rage and look ahead, although the future that awaits him after so many years in prison is still very uncertain. He is confident that the plumbing skills he has learned in prison will open the doors to some employment for him, although he has yet to learn to live in freedom.

Public defenders

Although the scientific community now considers that the evidence with bite marks is not reliable to find the culprits, in the past they have been used in the United States as decisive evidence to send the accused to prison. Even in injuries, like the one presented by the Tampa woman, that did not correspond to bites.

"In my case", explained Krone in an interview in 2013 with EL MUNDO, "the public defenders who treated me did absolutely nothing. I should have had well-paid legal assistance, but that costs more than 100,000 euros and I simply , I didn't have that money. "

Krone, who the media dubbed "the murderer with the crooked teeth" spent two years in solitary confinement on death row knowing that everyone except his family and friends who always believed in him considered him a monster. Until DNA tests proved he was innocent. "They analyzed the victim's clothes and found that there was DNA that did not correspond to me or her. They searched a national database and discovered that it belonged to a man who was on probation and who lived very close to the victim. Thus I was released and he was sentenced, "he had a broad smile from Madrid, a city to which he had been invited by Amnesty International.

If it was difficult for Krone to adapt to life in freedom, "I did not know how to use mobile phones and in the car I put the turn signal and the windshield wiper works," for Duboise it will not be easy either, although she has the support of her mother and his sister who were waiting for him this Thursday when he was released from prison.

"The first thing I wanted to do was hug my mother and I already have. I have no place in my life for bitterness. If you keep hatred and bitterness in your heart, it simply robs you of the joy of everything else," he said. excited in statements to the media collected by 'Tampabay'.

However, he did want to call for people to support the work of groups like the Innocent Project that are fighting to free unjustly convicted people because he said: "I, unfortunately, am not the only one."

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