I-Team: Rape conviction overturned 20 years later; Dean Gillespie to be freed

CINCINNATI - His mother says it's the best Christmas present ever. A judge has decided to set free a Montgomery County, Ohio, man who spent 20 years in prison for three rapes he swore he did not commit.

The judge agreed that prosecutors withheld crucial evidence in the case: that the initial police detectives had cleared Dean Gillispie because he didn't fit the victims' descriptions or the profile. He also had an alibi and there was no physical evidence.

Once those detectives retired, the man who had pointed them in Gillispie's direction approached the new detectives, who re-opened the case.

Two years had passed since the rapes. The new detectives set up a photo lineup and asked the three women who had been kidnapped from a Dayton mall if they recognized their attacker. The photo was larger and on a different color background than the other photos in the lineup. The women picked it. With no physical evidence, their word was the prosecutors' main play.

A jury deadlocked 8 to 4 to acquit Gillispie. The judge sent them back, and they convicted him in February 1991 of nine counts of rape, three counts of kidnapping, three counts of gross sexual imposition, and one count of aggravated robbery.

Two decades later, he's about to be set free. He may have gotten out years ago had he admitted to the crimes. That's what the parole board required.

He wouldn't do it.

He sat his prison while his mother, Juana Gillispie, asked attorney Mark Godsey to make this one of the first cases of the University of Cincinnati Innocence Project. Godsey has been working the case since 2003 with some powerful allies, including former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro, who also believed Gillispie's conviction should be overturned.

Thursday, U.S. Judge Michael Merz decided Gillispie "was denied his right to due process" because the prosecutors never told the defense that the initial detectives had cleared Gillispie. The ruling clears the way for the 46-year-old Fairborn man to be released within a few days from the Warren County Correctional Center.