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Man arraigned for two Boston rapes after prosecutors say novel DNA test rules out twin brother as possible suspect
By adamg on Mon, 09/15/2014 - 5:46pm
Dwayne McNair, 33, of Dedham, had bail set at $500,000 today on charges he and a pal raped one woman in Forest Hills and another on Mission Hill in 2004, after the Suffolk County District Attorney's office and Boston Police got back test results they say proved the DNA found in a used condom saved by one of the victims could not have come from McNair's twin brother.
Prosecutors had dropped charges against McNair in April because of the twin question.
McNair will now become the first person in the US to go to trial based on a new testing method by a European company, Eurofins Scientific, which announced only in December, 2013 that it had developed a testing method that could detect subtle differences in the DNA of even identical twins.
Prosecutors received the test results on Sept. 5, showing that Dwayne McNair was 2 billion times more likely to have been the source of the DNA evidence than his brother. The Grand Jury returned the new indictments that same day.
The DA's office says McNair will be the first person in the US to be tried with the testing. In addition to the test results, prosecutors say McNair's alleged accomplice, Anwar Thomas, will testify against him - and say he can tell the difference between the two brothers. Thomas pleaded guilty to the rapes and is in state prison.
According to the DA's office, on Sept. 20, 2004, the two men:
[A]bducted a woman who was walking alone in the Forest Hills area at gunpoint, pistol-whipped her, and drove her to a remote location where the men sexually assaulted and robbed her.
Nine days later, on Sept. 29, the men again abducted a woman walking alone at night, this time from the area of Parker and Hillside streets in Roxbury. The victim was forced into a vehicle, struck several times in the face with a gun, and sexually assaulted. Her cell phone, wallet, and her ID were also stolen during the attack.
The victim in this latter attack had the presence of mind to take a condom that one of the men had used and discarded.
Innocent, etc.
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Comments
rot in hell...
Im glad that girl was brave and smart to grab that condom thats somthing, she sought revenge on those bastards,im really happy for that..now he can get raped in jail see if he likes it...
Normally I'd jump in here to
Normally I'd jump in here to express disgust about our society's sadistic attitudes towards sexual assault in prison, but in this case I just can't muster the effort. Guy deserves hell, and we've got places like that.
Also: "I'm (other twin's name)! dot com!"
I don't quite get what your
I don't quite get what your disgust is directed at? Sexual assault convicts are segregated from the rest of the prison population and have it much easier than murderers, drug dealers, armed robbers etc.
I was referring to the
I was referring to the general stance of taking satisfaction in the fact that someone's potentially going to get raped in prison, as if it's "good" or "deserved" rape or something, particularly when we have the highest incarcerated population in the world, many of whom are non-violent offenders. But I won't begrudge a guy for expressing such sentiment in this particular case; it's not the right venue for that argument.
If it were a more aggravated
If it were a more aggravated rape would you also not begrudge him that sentiment, or if it were a less outrageous form of rape would you then be outraged by his hope that the offender gets raped in jail?
Shrug
I'm outraged either way. I suppose I felt the need to tell him (or her) that his sentiment is pretty messed up, but at the same time acknowledge that I can at least understand he's coming from given the details of the crime. I guess I just could have called the commenter a sick asshole and have been done with it, since nowadays discourse can only exist on the extreme sides of any issue. On the other hand, I could have simply raped him silly.
How are humans like these men
How are humans like these men born? How can such evil even exist? Death penalty would be amazing here. They will probably just chill in prison and fit right in with all the other societal failures
Just kill the right person
Problem is, we as a nation have a very poor record when it comes to killing the wrong people. We also tend to produce psychopathic district attorneys with no sense of justice to and a huge sense of careerism to pursue that penalty.
Oh, but it makes people feel better to think they have killed a monster ... even if the real monster is still at large.
OMG Swirly
They not only held off on charging this guy until they had solid evidence they had the right twin, they actually sought out even better DNA testing that could prove it scientifically, and you go straight to "psychopathic district attorneys with no sense of justice"? Has any act by any cop ever met with your approval?
You people are so mean!
Sadistic rapist are people too! They have feelings!
__sarcasm off__
How sure are they?
Remember, there's one guy here who's a sadistic rapist, and another guy who's his identical twin. What do you think are the chances of accidentally convicting the wrong guy? How much risk do you want to run of putting an innocent man in prison given those chances? Remember, to be convicted of a crime, you must be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt.
Now, the new DNA evidence, coupled with the testimony of the other perpetrator, is compelling. However, when reading the claims of the company selling the new DNA comparison technique, you must take their claims with a grain of salt. If you actually click through to the paper describing the technique, you'll see that their results are based on a single experiment: "We recruited a pair of identical male twins as well as the wife and the child of one twin as volunteers."
How willing would you be to convict someone on the basis of the testimony of someone convicted of multiple brutal rapes, coupled with evidence from a company that's obviously trying to sell an expensive forensic technique and has only published the results of a single experiment with one data point?
I do hope that modern techniques like the one described can help solve these sorts of cold cases. But I worry about getting too excited too soon; I personally would need to see more compelling evidence than that single experiment before I'd be convinced that their results were anything other than luck, especially given their citations that mention similar techniques had already been tried and had failed by other researchers (for example: "These putative 19 SNP differences were validated using Solexa whole genome sequencing by HiSeq2000 (Illumina). However, the base sequences of all 19 SNPs were identical in the twins, suggesting typing errors as the source of the 19 SNPs in the Illumina Human 610-Quad BeadChips.... Comparison of their genomes revealed no specific variants in positions covered with at least 20× depth (at least two reads of each orientation)."
So I suppose
unless there's actual video footage of said (murder,rape,fill-in-the-blank), and the perp is caught red handed, we just can't chance prosecuting and convicting anyone? A 2 billion in 1 chance according to the most advanced DNA testing available, and nope, can't risk it.
I'm a firm believer in getting a fair trial, appeals, etc. But really, at what point does our admittedly not 100% full-proof system grind to a complete halt, and what would that do to our society? You can argue that many non-violent offenders may not belong locked up, but I have no doubt the vast majority of violent offenders are in fact 'violent offenders', who should be locked and removed from society, so they can no longer hurt innocent people, or just commit murder and mayhem,period.