DNA clears man who served 37 years in prison for 1983 murder and rape
By Joshua Rhett Miller
New York Post
August 28, 2020
A Florida man who served 37 years behind bars walked out of prison
one day after prosecutors said DNA evidence exonerated him in a 1983
murder and rape of a woman in Tampa.
Robert Duboise, 55, was released Thursday from the Hardee
Correctional Institution in Bowling Green, where his mother, sister and
an attorney greeted him as a free man for the first time in nearly four
decades, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
“It’s an overwhelming sense of relief,” Duboise told reporters,
adding that he wasn’t angry for being wrongfully convicted in the case
that relied on bite-mark evidence and a jailhouse informant. “I don’t
have room in my life for bitterness. If you keep hatred and bitterness
in your heart, it just steals your joy from everything else.”
Duboise, who was originally sentenced to death, saw his sentence
later reduced to life in prison following an appeal. He was convicted in
the 1983 murder and rape of Barbara Grams, 19, who was attacked as she
walked home from her job at a Tampa mall, the newspaper reports.
The Innocence Project picked up Duboise’s case in 2018 and notified
the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit. Teresa Hall,
the attorney who heads the department, told a judge Wednesday old DNA
samples from a rape kit did not match Duboise, clearing the way for his
Thursday release.
Without a legal basis for keeping Duboise incarcerated, Judge
Christopher Nash ordered he be set free and amended his life sentence to
time already served. A Sept. 14 hearing has been set to overturn his
conviction, the newspaper reports.
Duboise learned Wednesday that he would soon be set free, but he had doubts, he said.
”After all these years, you always have to wonder if they’re going to
throw another curve in there somewhere,” he told reporters.
Recent tests of the DNA samples from the rape kit in the case did
include DNA from two other men, including one who is now a person of
interest in the 1983 slaying, Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren
said.
“I hope God has mercy on his soul,” Duboise said. “I’m not his judge.”
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