I was driving this morning to an appointment, listening to an interview on National Public Radio of a horror story…with a good ending, and a couple of interesting synchros to boot.
It’s the story about Kirk Noble Bloodsworth, 53, the first American sentenced to death row, who was exonerated by DNA evidence. Bloodsworth spent eight years in prison, two of them on death row after falsely being convicted of sexual assault, rape and premeditated first-degree murder of a nine-year-old girl in 1985. At the time of his arrest, Bloodsworth, a former Marine with an honorable discharge, had never been arrested.
Even though five eyewitnesses had placed him with the victim, he continued to maintain his innocence throughout his trial and subsequent incarceration. In 1992, while in jail, Bloodsworth read an account of how DNA fingerprinting had led to the conviction of Colin Pitchfork in the killings of Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann. Hoping to prove his innocence, he pushed to have the evidence against him tested by the then-novel method.
Initially, it was thought that DNA evidence- traces of semen in the victim’s underwear – had been destroyed. However, Bloodsworth kept pursuing the issue and finally the evidence was located in a paper bag in the judge’s chambers. Testing proved that the semen didn’t match Bloodsworth’s DNA. He was released from prison in 1993.
Bloodsworth was on the radio today in the aftermath of the State of Maryland’s decision to abolish the death penalty, the eighth state to do so. Bloodsworth’s case was cited as a major impetus for abolishing the law.
When asked in the NPR interviewer about his thoughts on the justice system, Bloodsworth said that initially he was confident he would be found not guilty because he didn’t do it. He gave his alibi, but five witnesses proceeded to misidentify him as the perpetrator. He also said it was his pursuit of justice that eventually set him free, not the workings of the justice system.
He told a story of his attorney coming to visit him in jail while he was on trial. They sat in chairs facing each other with a glass partition between them. Behind the lawyer was a brick wall. Bloodsworth recalls the lawyer saying: “You’re in a heap of trouble Kirk, but I’ll do all I can to help you.”
The lawyer finished the conversation repeating, “I’ll do all I can to help you.” He then placed his hand on the glass in front of Kirk, in lieu of a handshake. “Then he stood up, turned, and walked right into the brick wall,” Bloodsworth recalls.
That turned out to be a fitting symbol, a synchronicity for the conviction that was to follow. Another synchro is his name. DNA from his blood proved he was innocent and freed him. Bloodsworth, indeed. A book (pictured above) called BLOODSWORTH was written about his case.
Today, Bloodsworth is a program officer for the Justice Project, and he has been an ardent supporter of the Innocence Protection Act (IPA) since its introduction in Congress in February 2000. The IPA establishes the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Program, a program that will help states defray the costs of post-conviction DNA testing.
Though released from prison, Bloodsworth was not formally exonerated. In 2003, nearly a decade after his release, prison DNA evidence added to state and federal databases identified the real killer, Kimberly Shay Ruffner. A month after the 1984 murder, Ruffner had been sentenced to 45 years for an unrelated burglary, attempted rape and assault with intent to murder, and ironically had been incarcerated in a cell one floor below Bloodsworth’s own cell. In 2004 Ruffner pled guilty to the 1984 murder.

















