Lawyers are wrangling over what evidence can be used in a 16-year-old murder case.
It involves a man accused of the 1991 killing of Patricia Scoville in Stowe.
Her parents worked after her death to establish a database of DNA evidence.
Now, the man accused in Scoville’s killing wants the genetic evidence thrown out. The lawyer for 60-year-old Howard Godfrey of Kirby also wants a conversation he had with police excluded.
Attorney Kerry DeWolfe argues that police used coercive tactics when they interviewed Godfrey in 2005 after he turned up in a match in the new state DNA database.
That’s the catalog that was created at the urging of the 28-year-old victim’s parents, David and Ann Scoville.
Police discovered a match in the database between DNA found on Patricia Scoville’s body and a sample Godfrey gave after his 1996 conviction in an unrelated case.