DNA MAY FREE FLORIDA MAN

Allen Crotzer has spent more than half his life in prison, but many who know about him believe he's innocent of the crime of which he was convicted.

Years ago, witnesses said Crotzer was a rapist, a dark-eyed man with a sawed-off shotgun. One of three St. Petersburg men accused of kidnapping and raping a 12-year-old girl and 38-year-old woman at gunpoint after a robbery in Tampa in July 1981, Crotzer was cast as the ringleader in an assault that shocked the Tampa Bay area.

Now, almost 24 years after his conviction, a team of lawyers says DNA evidence proves Crotzer was not the rapist. Several witnesses, including one of Crotzer's co-defendants, say Crotzer was not there that evening in Tampa.


With Hillsborough County prosecutors reviewing his case, Crotzer, now 44, may become the fifth person in Florida to be exonerated by DNA. If prosecutors agree to clear him, he would join a growing roster of exonerated prisoners in Florida. "Now that the DNA testing proves Alan Crotzer is innocent, I fully expect the state will again do justice and ask the court to overturn his wrongful conviction," said David Menschel, the lead attorney on Crotzer's case and a former staff member of the Innocence Project-New York, which works to use DNA testing to free wrongly convicted defendants....

A question of identity

After looking at dozens of photos, some of the robbery victims identified brothers Douglas and Corlenzo James as two of the assailants. ater, the woman sat alone in a room with a detective, sifting through more photos, looking for the man who raped her. She had already looked at several photo packs when she suddenly screamed and threw Crotzer's photo down on the table. "It's him."

Paroled after serving time for a 1979 robbery, Crotzer, then 20, had been out of prison a month before the 1981 robbery and rapes. Police were looking for a 6-foot-tall, 130-pound man with sideburns. What they found when they arrested Crotzer was a man who was 5 feet 5 and 135 pounds who didn't look like the man the victims described. Crotzer told police he didn't know what they were talking about. His protests fell on deaf ears; nine months later, he and Douglas James were tried together in a Tampa court.

After a four-day trial, the all-white jury convicted Crotzer of two counts of sexual assault, as well as armed robbery, burglary, aggravated assault and false imprisonment. Douglas James was convicted of one count of sexual assault, armed robbery, burglary and aggravated assault. Each was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison.

When Crotzer's story resurfaced, it landed on a cluttered desk in New York in late 2002, 1,200 miles away from the Polk County prison where Crotzer was serving his sentence. Crotzer laid out his case in a letter to the Innocence Project, the New York-based legal nonprofit that has successfully uncovered dozens of wrongful convictions. He said he had filed an appeal asking a court to review DNA evidence in his case.

Crotzer's motion was denied, but his case caught the attention of Innocence Project volunteer Sam Roberts and attorney Menschel. Roberts began trying to track down any remaining evidence from Crotzer's trial. He struck gold: An official at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's crime lab in Tampa said she had found five slides of material taken from the rape victims more than 20 years earlier.

The two approached Hillsborough prosecutor Michael Sinacore about having an independent lab in Maryland perform a DNA test on the material to see if any semen present in the samples matched Crotzer's DNA or if the results would exclude him as a rapist. Sinacore agreed. But the Maryland lab said the samples were too small to determine whether there was a DNA match. When the initial tests failed to produce meaningful results, Roberts and Menschel worried that DNA evidence wouldn't pan out. So they flew to Florida in May 2003 to ask Crotzer's co-defendants, Corlenzo and Douglas James, what they knew.

They visited Corlenzo James, 45, first. He admitted Crotzer was not with him and his brother the night of the rapes, but he refused to sign a statement to that effect, Roberts said. Corlenzo wouldn't budge, but Douglas, 52, was different. "We didn't even have a chance to ask the question before he started talking," Menschel said. "He said his brother Corlenzo was the shotgun-wielding double-rapist, and his childhood friend was" the third man.

Crotzer's attorneys persuaded Sinacore to allow them to send the slides to Dr. Edward Blake, a pioneer in DNA forensics. The lab's work proved crucial; test results showed DNA evidence excluded Crotzer as a rapist. Menschel and McClain have filed a motion asking a Hillsborough court to throw out Crotzer's conviction and sentence. "Every day that Alan Crotzer remains in prison is a day too long," Menschel said.

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