content: In 2005 the Governor of Virginia Mark Warner ordered that all biological samples between 1973 and 1988 be rechecked. Over a third of those tested excluded an individual accused of committing a crime In discussions of false accusations, it's often taken for granted that any man convicted must necessarily be guilty. Here's a chilling reminder of why that's simply not true: How was it that Bennett Barbour’s DNA came to be tested several decades after the alleged rape? In September 2004, Mark Warner, then Virginia’s governor, ordered a random audit of 31 old criminal cases after a vast trove of biological evidence was discovered lying around in old case files saved by state forensic serologists. The testing of those 31 samples led to the exonerations of two convicted rapists. Warner, embarrassed by the revelations, then ordered in late 2005 that every sample obtained between 1973 and 1988 be rechecked. It amounted to thousands of files. It was a project intended to take 18 months at a cost of $1.4 million dollars. Now in its seventh year, the cost of the project hovers at $5 million. Nobody has any idea exactly how the Virginia Department of Forensics has conducted its work. Indeed, no one knows much about the specifics of the crime lab’s work at all. According to the Richmond Times Dispatch, the state located approximately 800 biological samples of DNA that could be tested. Of those, only 214 were in sufficient condition to yield accurate results. Among these, more than 70 people—one commonly cited figure is 79—appear to have been excluded as the perpetrators of a crime. 79 out of 214 is 36%, that's a shockingly high figure. And those were just the lucky ones who happened to have evidence come to light exhonorating them, what about the other three quarters of cases where the samples weren't fit for testing? What about all the cases where people were convicted without physical evidence? Just think about all the men currently in prison because the jury thought they looked guilty or their accuser sounded more convincing. Beyond all reasonable doubt is a fiction, people are convicted based on stories told by lawyers.