Liberty faculty members head Innocence Project to exonerate the wrongly convicted

Jens Soering, a German-born University of Virginia student convicted in 1990 of murdering his girlfriend’s parents, is closer to being exonerated than ever before, thanks to the forensic investigation of a Liberty University professor.

Dr. J. Thomas McClintock, Liberty’s director of forensic science and professor of biology, has been working on the forensic DNA analysis on new evidentiary samples of the Soering case since last summer. McClintock is also working with Liberty’s law school and the Criminal Justice Program to develop an Innocence Project, opening 2019 or 2020, which will seek to exonerate others believed to have been wrongly convicted.

McClintock said that the goal of the Innocence Project is to work on a variety of cases like the Soering case, where the sentence and the interpretation of the evidence is in question and exoneration is worth pursuing.

“The Innocence Project attempts to look at cases that have been unresolved … maybe some new evidence out there has been found that can be analyzed,” McClintock said. “It’s also for those who have been wrongfully convicted. Of course, you can literally ask everyone who is incarcerated, and they’ll say they’re innocent, but there really are many that are incarcerated wrongfully. ”

Derek and Nancy Haysom were murdered in their Bedford County home March 30, 1985. Soering was charged with double murder, along with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom.

According to a letter, presented at the debut showing of the movie “Killing for Love,” Soering wrote to the Liberty community December 2017, he made the decision to plead guilty because he was passionately in love with Elizabeth Haysom. He feared that if she was left alone to take the blame, she would be sentenced to the electric chair.

“Would you really be OK with being the first person in a long chain of people who put your friend or boyfriend or girlfriend in the electric chair? What do you think that would do to you over the years and decades to come?” Soering wrote in the letter. “Could you really go through life knowing that you helped put someone you know, care about or love in the hot seat of ‘Ol’ Sparky?’”

According to McClintock, Soering also assumed that, as the son of a German diplomat, he would be granted immunity and sent back to Germany. Instead, Soering was ultimately convicted of two first-degree counts of murder and sentenced to prison for life.

In summer 2017, Steven D. Rosenfield, Soering’s attorney, contacted both McClintock and Moses Schanfield, a DNA expert at George Washington University, and asked the DNA specialists to examine the available data in the case files and render their scientific opinion.

Based on their examination and analysis of the DNA found at the Haysom murder crime scene, McClintock and Schanfield both concluded that Soering was not present for the murders.

“(Schanfield and I) both came up with the same interpretation of the DNA that was identified at the crime scene. None of those profiles matched Jens Soering,” McClintock said. “In fact, the DNA profiles that were discovered suggested at least one — maybe two — males, foreign to Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering.”

According to McClintock and Schanfield, if the information acquired from their analysis of the DNA taken from the crime scene had been presented during the original trials, Soering would have not have been convicted of the crime. If the case is retried and the crime scene DNA analysis is presented, Soering will likely be pardoned.

“Right now, the case is closed because they figure (the State has) two convicted murderers,” McClintock said. “There is a group of us who have petitioned the government to pardon Jens Soering. (These petitions) started probably two terms ago and have been passed on from one governor to the next.”

McClintock suggested picturing Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts” character Pig-Pen, who is always surrounded by a visible cloud of dirt and filth, as a visual for how prevalently humans shed skin and hair possessing their DNA, which can then be acquired and used to create a DNA profile.

“If you can imagine, we shed tens of thousands of cells a day — we are like little Pig-Pens, going around shedding skin cells,” McClintock said. “Looking for that sort of trace evidence is difficult, but you can find it. Right now, we’re not seeing anything that would suggest that (Soering) was (at the scene of the crime).”

Currently, the School of Law is working with McClintock in order to develop an innocence project at Liberty. McClintock is pursuing accreditation for the forensic science laboratory, where he could examine DNA samples and create DNA profiles which could prove to be conclusive evidence in some cases.

In addition, McClintock is pursuing accreditation of the undergraduate forensic science program through the Forensic Science Education Program Commision of the American Academy of Forensic Science.

“There are a lot of new techniques being developed. If you have samples that can be tested they can be subjected to data analysis and so you get a profile. That would be the goal: to open up the case and see if some investigative leads could be followed up, maybe do some additional testing of the samples (that are still left).”

Liberty’s innocence project will be primarily housed by the School of Law. Law students will work with criminal justice and forensic science students to perform initial investigations and analysis of data presented in the cases.

“(We’ll say to students), ‘Here’s a case, work through your observations and investigative leads — is this case worthy of reevaluation?” McClintock said.

Deirdre M. Enright, the director of investigation for the UVA law school’s innocence project, will be coming to Liberty to meet with McClintock and the law school faculty who will be involved in Liberty’s innocence project on March 5. Faculty will have the opportunity to seek advice and insight from Enright.

“Once (the innocence project) is up and going, the next step is to get the lab accredited, which is going to take a little while,” McClintock said. “But once the innocence project (is established), we can analyze samples that come to our lab and hopefully find justice through science.”