As dusk settled over Denver on Dec. 22, the first day of winter, Clarence Moses-EL walked out of the county jail, free for the first time in 28 years. The shortest day of the year would be the end of the longest nightmare of his life. It was all because of a dream.
Moses-EL was charged with rape in 1987. Initially, the rape victim named the three men she had been drinking with as her possible attackers. Then, a day and a half later, she dreamed that her neighbor, Clarence Moses-EL, was the attacker. She told the police, and they arrested him. The three men she first named were never investigated. There was no physical evidence linking Moses-EL to the crime. The dream was the only piece of “evidence” offered against him.
There was, however, real evidence available to the prosecution: the victim’s rape kit, along with bedsheets and the victim’s clothing. These items were never tested for DNA. In 1995, after years in prison, Moses-EL won a court order mandating the forensic analysis of the evidence, which could have freed him. He managed to raise $1,000 from fellow inmates to pay for the tests. The judge instructed the Denver Police to turn over the evidence. The police marked the evidence box “Do Not Destroy,” then, inexplicably, threw it into a dumpster.
“I literally broke down in the cell,” he said. “I was blown away. Broken,” Moses-EL told Denver Post investigative journalists Susan Greene and Miles Moffeit in 2007. “They broke their own rules and threw out the only key to my freedom.” Greene and Moffeit wrote about Moses-EL and other prisoners across the U.S. who had potentially exculpatory DNA evidence destroyed. They were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for their series “Trashing the Truth.” Greene has since become the editor of The Colorado Independent news website, and has never stopped reporting on Moses-EL’s case.