Commonwealth v. Scott

In December, 1984, a young woman was found dead, her body badly beaten, in a vacant lot in Boston. Twenty-three years later, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was extracted from samples taken from the victim’s body and clothing soon after her death and run through a national computerized database. A match was found with the defendant’s DNA. The defendant was tried for murder in the first degree. His defense at trial was that he had had consensual sex with the victim but had not been the killer. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on theories of premeditation, extreme atrocity or cruelty, and…