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Bitemark case

Arizona v Ray Krone
Background
           On December 29, 1991, the body of thirty-six year old Kim Ancona was found nude and fatally stabbed in the men’s restroom of the bar she worked at in Phoenix, Arizona. The perpetrator left behind little evidence, only leaving blood at the crime scene which matched the victim’s type and saliva on her body coming from the most common blood type. No semen was found and no DNA testing was done on the blood or saliva. What investigators did rely on was bite-marks on the victim’s breast and neck.
           The police learned from a friend of the victim’s that Ancona was to close up the bar with a regular customer, Ray Krone, that previous night. The police immediately asked Krone to make an impression of his teeth on Styrofoam for comparison. Ray Krone had no previous criminal record, had been honorable discharged from the military, and had worked in the postal service for seven years. On December 31, 1991, Krone was arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault.
           Throughout his 1992 trial Krone maintained his claim of innocence, claiming to have been asleep in his bed at the time of the crime. However, bite-mark analysis experts for the prosecution testified that the bite-marks found on Ancona’s body matched those extracted from the Styrofoam. A jury convicted him on the counts of murder and kidnapping, but was found not guilty of sexual assault. He was sentenced to death for the murder and 21 years for kidnapping.
New Trial
           In 1996, Krone won a new trial of appeal but was convicted again, mainly on the state’s supposed expert bite-mark testimony. The sentence however was changed to life imprisonment; stemming from the judge’s doubts about whether Krone was really the killer. In 2002, after ten years of Krone’s imprisonment, DNA testing conducted on the saliva and blood found on the victim excluded Krone as the source. Instead, it matched a man named Kenneth Phillips, who was incarcerated for an unrelated sex crime and lived a short distance from the bar the victim worked at during the time of the crime.
Release
           On April 8, 2002, Krone was released from prison and on April 24th, the District Attorney’s office filed to formally dismiss all charges. Ray Krone is the 100th former death row inmate freed because of innocence since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty. He was the twelfth death row inmate whose innocence has been proven through post-conviction DNA testing.
 

Works Cited
“Ray Krone.” Innocence Project, www.innocenceproject.org/cases/ray-krone/.
“Ray Krone.” Ray Krone - National Registry of Exonerations, June 2012, www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3365.

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