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It Could Happen To Any Of Us
by Jack Newfield, Parade Magazine
appeared in Parade Magazine, Feburary 23, 2003, pages 4-6
RAY KRONE IS A FORMER member of his Lutheran church choir, a former Boy Scout, a former Little League ballplayer. He's also a former resident of death row. And as the 100th condemned person to have his sentence or conviction overturned since the death penalty was reinstated in 1973, he is both symbol and survivor.
Krone, now 46, walked out of prison in Arizona on April 8, 2002, vindicated by DNA evidence after serving 10 years for a particularly barbaric murder he did not commit. Now Krone is spending his days testifying before Congress, making speeches against the death penalty and bearing personal witness to the possibility of the state executing an innocent man. His story is the nightmare narrative of what can happen to any of us, with a little bad luck.
"Before I went to death row, I believed in capital punishment," Krone told me. "Now I realize that if they could convict me, they could convict anybody by mistake."
Krone's odyssey began in 1991. He was working as a mailman in Phoenix. He had no criminal record. He had finished in the top 10 percent of his high school graduating class. He had served seven years in the Air Force and been honorably discharged. He was an optimistic, extroverted, happy citizen.
Then he was arrested for the murder of Kim Ancona, a bartender whom he knew at the CBS Lounge, where he liked to play darts and watch football on television. The victim had been sexually assaulted and stabbed many times. Her body was found in the bathroom of the bar on Dec. 29, 1991.
"I knew I was innocent, so I didn't even hire a private lawyer," Krone said. "I had an alibi. My roommate told the police I was home with him, sleeping at the time of the murder. But somehow I was convicted. In 11 months, I went from arrest to death row."
The jury convicted Krone of the testimony of a forensic dentist name Ray Rawson, who testified that Krone's teeth matched the bite marks on the victim's breast. Krone's court-appointed lawyer couldn't afford to produce his own bite-mark expert witness to challenge Rawson's testimony.
In 1992, DNA science was not developed enough to be a factor in the trial. There was no fingerprint evidence, and no fresh semen on the victim. All the blood at the crime scene was type O -- the same as Krone's, the same as the victim's and teh same as millions of other Americans.
"When I got to the prison in Florence, Ariz., I got a job in the law library," Krone said. "I started researching my own case. I read everything about bite-mark imperssions and how unreliable it was as evidence."
Although prison was tough, Krone said, "I felt helpless but never hopeless. My family enver lost faith in me. They believed I was innocent."
After about a year, Krone made contact with a well-to-do second cousin he had never met named Jim Rix, who lived near Lake Tahoe, Nev. Rix became Krone's guardian angel, agreeing to finance an appeal and to locate other bite-mark experts to regute the trial testimony. (Forensic experts now say that 63 percent of bite-mark analyses generate false positives.)
"The first time I ever met Ray was on death row," Rix, 60, told me. "I spent about $100,000 over eight years trying to reopen his case. I eventually got Chris Plourd, a lawyer from San Diego, to take up Ray's appeal. I have to admit that when I first got into it, I presumed Ray was guilty. Then I studied the evidence."
Meanwhile, Ray Krone was doing hard time on death row without ever losing his instinctive optimism. "I read Papillon [the story of falsely accused prisoner who escaped from Devil's Island] twice," Krone recalled. "It helped inspire me. But I also saw things in prison that I can never talk about. I had my share of fights to survive."
Krone's positive outlook endured even after he was convicted a second time in a retrial in 1996. It was still too early for DNA testing to liberate the truth, and the forensic dentist testified again that it was Krone's bite mark on the dead woman. But the defense produced its own forensic dentists, who said the bite mark was not a match. This time, Krone was sentenced to life in prison.
"I was more devastated than Ray when we lost the second trial," Chris Plourd told me. "Ray was resilient and determined. He gave me support, because I became so depressed.
"From the beginning, Ray was like no other inmate I have ever met. The first time I visited him on death row, in 1994, a guard told me, 'I hope you can held Ray. He's not like everyone else in here.' The guards loved him. They understood he was a victim of circumstances beyond his control."
PLOURD WORKED ON THE case for seven years for free, commuting from San Diego to Phoenix and FLorence, Ariz., preparing for the retrial and the appeals.
"It was Ray's basic decency that kept me so committed to his case," Plourd said. "Something terrible had happened to Ray through no fault of his own. It was fate, not him. It was as if he had been struck by some catastrophic disease, not anything he did."
How did Ray Krone keep his sanity intact and his hope laive after two convictions> "I was just fortunate that my family never accepted my guilt," Krone replied. "My friends remained loyal to me. My classmates from high school raised money for my defense at a class reunion. That kept my spirit alive. I drew strength from knowing I wasn't alone or forgotten."
By the fall of 1999, the technology of DNA testing had been refined to a more sophisticated level. That's when another attorney -- Alan Simpson of Phoenix, hired by Krone's family -- began to work on the case in close collaboration with Plourd.
One of these new DNA tests, coducted on the saliva found on Kim Ancona's tank top, determined that it was not Krone's. Then another round of DNA tests was performed on blood from the crime scene as well as the saliva: It tried to match the DNA to a new database of samples from convicted offenders. (This database did not exist in 1992 or 1996).
These tests strongly suggested a match with a man named Kenneth Phillips, who already was in prison, convicted of child molestation. Phillips, in fact, was in the prison in Florence at the same time as Krone.
On April 8, 2002, a lawyer from the Maricopa County prosecutor's office went before a judge in Phoenix to say the odds that the DNA on the victim came from someone other than Phillips were 1 in 1.3 quadrillion. Phillips also had type O blood. And now the prosecutors acknowleged that a bite-mark expert said that he "could not eliminate Phillips" as the person who left his bite mark on the victim. (Phillips later was indicted for the murder. His trial is scheduled to start next month.)
That was when Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Alfred Fenzel ordered Ray Kronw released from prison after 10 years. That same morning, Chris Ploud drove 160 miles from San Diego to Yuma to welcome Krone back into the world of freedom.
One of the guards who escorted Krone intot he spring sunlight was among those who had escorted him to his cell on death row in 1992. "I was overwhelmed with emotion," Krone said. "I don't remember everything. I know I walked out holding a Bible."
There was a large contingent of television cameras and print reporters waiting for Krone, ebcasue he had been named the 100th individual to have his sentence or conviction struck down after being found guilty of capital murder. One of the first things Krone told the assembled media was how sorry he felt for the victim and for her family. "I never had a chance to grieve or express my condolences, he said.
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Krone now lives outside York, Pa., in an apartment near his mother and stepfather. He does not have a steady job and says he is slowly trying to adjust to the new world of cell phones, ATMs and other technological advances made during the deacde torn out of his life. "My consumerism is obsolete by 10 years," he said with a laugh. "I'm learning how to use a microwave oven now."
When asked about his wrongful conviction, Krone replied: "I just know I'm not the only one. If they could do it to me -- with a steady job with the Postal Service, no criminal record and a solid alibi -- I know they have done it to other people."
Yet, by his own telling, Ray Krone feels no bitterness. And this emotional miracle of forgiveness is confirmed by his family, friends and lawyers. He is one of those rare human beings who sees the good in each situation or individual before he sees the bad.
One of Krone's most liberating moments, he said, came when he was able to embrace the victim's aging mother, Patricia Gasman, in a Phoenix courtroom last April. "I finally got to tell her that I was sorry for the loss of her daughter," Krone recalled. "I told her she was also the victim of the prosecutors getting the wrong person. She was the victim of an injustice too." Then, still in a terful embrace, Krone told Gasman, "I'm just sorry I didn't get to know you when your daughter was alive."
"She was crying, and I was crying," he asdded. "She was hugging me and apologizing for hating me and asking my forgiveness. I told her that I understood why she hated me and that I never held it against her. She hated the murderer, and that wasn't me."
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