Cathy Woods, 64,
[From article]
Prosecutors are dropping the case against a Nevada woman who spent more than 30 years in prison for a 1976 murder before a judge ordered a new trial based on recently discovered DNA evidence, the district attorney said Friday.
Washoe County District Attorney Chris Hicks told reporters that there will be no retrial of Cathy Woods in the fatal stabbing of Michelle Mitchell on the edge of the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno.
A judge threw out the conviction in September after new DNA evidence linked the Reno crime scene to an Oregon inmate who now faces murder charges in California in a string of killings about the same time.
[. . .]
Woods, now 64, was convicted in 1980 and again five years later. The convictions were based largely on the confession she made in 1979 at the psychiatric hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, where her mother committed her months earlier.
Prosecutors at those trials argued that only Mitchell’s killer could have known the information Woods provided to police in her confession.
[. . .]
Pusich said Woods doesn’t remember acknowledging the killing while hospitalized in March 1979.
“I’m told it was a product of wanting to get a private room,” Pusich told the Associated Press earlier. “She was being told she wasn’t sufficiently dangerous to qualify, and within a short period she was claiming she had killed a woman in Reno.”
http://nypost.com/2015/03/06/woman-exonerated-after-30-years-in-jail-for-76-murder/
DNA frees woman after 30 years locked up for murder
By Associated Press
New York Post
March 6, 2015 | 2:39pm
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