I argued that Jens Söring was wrongfully convicted of a double murder, and in 2019, he was released on parole after three decades in prison. Then I started having doubts about the case.
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I had been avoiding my friend Jens Söring for months. Whenever his emails arrived, I’d open a reply window and stare with dread at the blinking cursor. I no longer knew what to say to him, this man who had spent 33 years in prison for a double homicide he swore he didn’t commit.
Jens had been convicted of murder in 1990. I had been convicted of murder nearly 20 years later. But the parallels between our cases were striking. While studying abroad in Italy in 2007, I had been accused of killing my roommate Meredith Kercher with the help of a man I’d been dating for just a week. Jens, too, had been studying abroad—he was a German citizen attending the University of Virginia—and he, too, had been accused of a brutal killing, allegedly with the help of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom. The murder weapon in both cases was a knife. Elizabeth had been portrayed in the media as a psychologically disturbed femme fatale; I’d been called “Luciferina” in the courtroom and “Foxy Knoxy” in the tabloids. Both of our cases involved a confession obtained without legal counsel present. And in both of our cases, biological evidence played an important role. I was freed only after independent experts debunked the supposed DNA evidence linking me to the crime. DNA analysis wasn’t available when Jens was tried—but applied decades later, it could be interpreted to support his claim of innocence. For a long time, I believed the major difference between Jens’s case and mine was this: I eventually got justice.