The Delaware County judge on Thursday ordered new trials for Derrick Chappell - who was 15 when he was arrested - and first cousins Morton Johnson and Sam Grasty.
Three men who have already served more than two decades in prison for the murder of a Chester woman have asked a judge to throw out their convictions.in the 1997 slaying of a 70-year-old woman even though their DNA never matched that found at the scene, but they will remain in prison while a prosecutor decides whether to appeal.
The three were charged and convicted in the death of Henrietta Nickens of Chester, who told her daughter in her last known phone call that she was about to watch the 11 p.m. news. She was later found badly beaten, with her underwear removed, and her home ransacked, with blood on the walls and bedding.
He called the prosecution's various theories of the case "preposterous." To explain the lack of a DNA match, he said, they argued that the victim perhaps had consensual sex before the slaying, or that the three defendants brought a used condom to the scene, he said. Yet Nickens was chronically ill and had no known male partners, he continued.
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