Orlando Boquete

The Crime

In the early morning hours of June 25, 1982, two men broke into a woman’s apartment in Stock Island, Florida. When the victim woke up, one man was on top of her on her bed, with his hand over her mouth. The woman later told police that the man did not rape her, but had ejaculated on her clothing. She described the man as Latino with no shirt and no hair. The second perpetrator had not entered the victim’s bedroom at any point.

The Investigation

Within minutes of the incident, a police officer stopped several Cuban American men who were in a nearby Tom Thumb convenience store parking lot. Only 27-year-old Orlando Boquete had no shirt and no hair. The police brought the victim to the scene. From a distance of 20 feet, she identified Mr. Boquete as her attacker as he sat in a police car. Mr. Boquete had a large black moustache at the time. After identifying Mr. Boquete, the victim added to her description that the attacker had a moustache. The woman also identified a second man in that group as the man who had not entered her room.

The Trial

On June 25, 1982, Mr. Boquete was charged with burglary and attempted sexual battery. He went to trial in Monroe County Circuit Court in December 1982. The victim identified Mr. Boquete as the perpetrator and said that she was sure that the semen had come from the perpetrator.

Police had collected the victim’s underwear and pajama top at the crime scene, and an analyst testified at trial that both had semen on them. James McNamara, a serologist from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement crime laboratory, testified that he had conducted blood type testing on the evidence and found spots that revealed type A blood. Other spots on the victim’s underwear showed no blood group markers. Mr. McNamara told the jury that both Mr. Boquete and the victim were type O non-secretors, meaning their blood type could not be identified from bodily fluids. The type A blood should have excluded Mr. Boquete as a possible perpetrator, but Mr. McNamara did not say he was excluded. Instead, he said the spots with no markers could have come from Mr. Boquete or 20% of the population.

Mr. Boquete testified that he had been home the entire evening with his family, watching sports on television, until he had gone to the convenience store with his cousins.

On Jan. 3, 1983, a jury convicted Mr. Boquete of burglary and attempted sexual assault. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the burglary conviction and received a concurrent sentence of five years for the attempted sexual assault conviction.

The Exoneration

In February 1985, Mr. Boquete escaped from prison. He was arrested in July 1995 and sent back. 

In 2000, the Florida legislature passed a law allowing prisoners to request DNA testing as long as the requests were filed by Jan. 1, 2003.

Mr. Boquete wrote to the Innocence Project seeking help. As the deadline approached, Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison sent forms to Mr. Boquete, which he used to file a motion on his own seeking DNA testing of the semen stains on the victim’s clothing. 

In 2004, the state agreed to the DNA testing and the judge ordered the evidence sent to a lab. In November 2005, Orchid Cellmark, a private laboratory, conducted the tests. The testing concluded that Mr. Boquete could not be the source of the semen on the woman’s underwear. No results were obtained for her pajama top.

Mr. Boquete’s conviction was overturned on May 23, 2006 with the agreement of Monroe County State Attorney Mark Kohl. 

Judge Richard Payne, in dismissing the case, declared, “No words spoken by this court today…would do justice to the penalty that you have been required to pay for offenses that now we know conclusively that you were not guilty of committing.”

While Mr. Boquete had been legally admitted to the United States in 1980, he had not completed an application to gain permanent status. As a consequence, he was taken into custody by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. At the urging of the prosecution and the Innocence Project, Mr. Boquete was released on Aug. 22, 2006.