A man charged in a sexual assault last week in a small downtown park was implicated more than a decade ago in a homicide through DNA evidence, but Cook County prosecutors never charged him. In fact, another man was convicted and later exonerated of the killing.
James Starkey, 36, was ordered held on $600,000 bail in Cook County Jail on an aggravated criminal sexual assault charge in the Wednesday night attack on a 20-year-old homeless man near West Adams and South Wells streets.
In 2002, Maurice Patterson was charged with fatally stabbing Robert Head after several eyewitnesses told Chicago police they saw Patterson near the murder scene. Prosecutors said in court at the time that a bloody knife found nearby was not the murder weapon because Head's blood wasn't on it. However, DNA testing showed Head's blood was, in fact, on the knife.
What's more, prosecutors did not disclose that DNA from Starkey's blood also was found on the knife.
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