Dean Cage, Innocent Man

Monday, October 26, 2009 at 10:44 pm

Dean Cage, Innocent Man Latest updates about Dean Cage, Dean Cage was convicted in 1996 and sentenced to 40 years in prison for the rape of a 15-year-old girl, who, at the time, identified him as her attacker. But Cage always maintained his innocence and asked for DNA tests to prove it. He said his family had even tried to pay for it themselves.

Those efforts fell on deaf ears until he wrote to the Innocence Project, which took his case in 2004.

The New York-based Innocence Project specializes in using DNA to exonerate the falsely convicted.

“The single greatest cause of wrongful convictions is victim misidentification,” said attorney Peter Neufeld, a co-founder of the organization.

Cage, who worked at a Chicago supermarket, said he was home at the time the teenager said she was attacked while walking to school in November 1994.

The teenager gave a composite drawing description to authorities and after it was circulated police brought Cage in as a suspect. The girl identified him as her attacker. Cage was also accused in the rape of a 29-year-old woman, but acquitted of those charges. Evidence at the time discounted Cage as the attacker, Neufeld said.

Finally after years of legal work and a long sought after DNA test, Cage’s conviction was overturned.
Dean Cage, Innocent Man
The Innocence Project said nationally Cage is now the 217th person exonerated by post-conviction DNA evidence. He is the 29th Illinoisan to be exonerated by DNA evidence. Only Texas, with 31, has more DNA exoneration cases than Illinois.

The conviction was dismissed at the request of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.

Cage was released from Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton and went straight to his mother’s home on Chicago’s South Side for an all-night celebration with family.

“It didn’t seem like it was real,” he said of life on the outside. “It was really scary. At the same time, it was a blessing.”