'I Think I'm Innocent'

DNA analysis is the most reliable crime-scene tool, having exonerated dozens of wrongly convicted people. But it can sometimes lead to tragic mistakes.

- Katie Worth

WHEN THE DNA results came back, even Lukis Anderson thought he might have committed the murder.

“I drink a lot,” he told public defender Kelley Kulick as they sat in an interview room at the jail in Santa Clara County, California. Sometimes he blacked out, so it was possible he had done something he didn’t remember. “Maybe I did do it.”

Kulick shushed him. “Lukis, shut up,” she said. If she was going to keep her new client off death row, he couldn’t go around saying things like that. But she agreed. It looked bad. “Let’s just work through the evidence to really see what happened.”

Before he was charged with murder, Anderson had been a 26-year-old homeless alcoholic with a long rap sheet who spent his days hustling for change in San Jose. The murder victim, Raveesh Kumra, was a 66-year-old investor who lived in Monte Sereno, a Silicon Valley enclave ten miles and many socioeconomic rungs away.

Around midnight on November 29, 2012, three men broke into Raveesh’s 7,000-square-foot mansion. They found him watching CNN in the living room, tied him up, blindfolded him, and gagged him with duct tape decorated with pictures of mustaches. They found his ex-wife, Harinder Kumra, asleep upstairs, hit her on the mouth, blindfolded her, and tied her up next to Raveesh down in the kitchen. Then they rummaged for cash and jewelry.

After the men left, Harinder, still blindfolded, felt her way to a phone and called 911. Police arrived, then an ambulance. One of the paramedics declared Raveesh dead. The coroner would later conclude that he had been suffocated by the mustache duct tape. Three and a half weeks later, the police arrested Anderson. His DNA had been found on Raveesh’s fingernails, suggesting that Raveesh had struggled as the intruders tied him up. Anderson was charged with murder. Kulick was appointed to his case.