DNA Convicts Virginia Murderer

The good news is that Virginia did not execute an innocent man. Roger Keith Coleman was executed in 1992 for killing his sister-in-law in 1981.

As CBS News observes, "A finding of innocence would have been explosive news and could have had a powerful effect on the public's attitude toward capital punishment. Death penalty opponents have been warning for years that the risk of a grave and irreversible mistake by the criminal justice system is too great to allow capital punishment."

The new DNA tests showed that "the probability that a randomly selected individual unrelated to Roger Coleman would coincidentally share the observed DNA profile is estimated to be 1 in 19 million."