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Camp site media.

About five years ago, in the fall of 2016, I received a message from an inmate at a jail in Seattle.

The email read,

There's a guy here who says that the state has been illegally detaining him for some six years due to his alleged DNA.

You can go online and check him out.

He says he's innocent.

I've written about the criminal justice system for about a decade now and I've gotten use to these types of letters

But this one was different at the time. I just published a long magazine article about something called touch DNA,

traces of human matter so small that they could be carried third hand onto the scene of a crime.

And what I'd learned writing that article

was that while DNA is treated in popular culture

like a truth meter, a guilt meter,

in reality, DNA evidence has to be interpreted by human beings.

Human beings who have biases, prejudices, human beings who make mistakes.

So what if the guy in Seattle was innocent?

Soon he and I were exchanging letters.

His often began with a kind of mental self-evaluation,

rendered in looping handwriting.

I've been under a lot of stress and this depression is getting the best to me, he wrote.

He shared details of his life.

...