at the University of Connecticut went into forensics; Hampikian won a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship and went to Australia to work on marsupial sex determination. At that time scientists had no way to tell if a single cell belonged to a male or female, and he was working to develop specific markers on the Y chromosome – unique to males – to make sex determination possible from DNA. Crime labs grew increasingly interested in appropriating this new knowledge and began asking Hampikian for help analyzing DNA collected at crimes scenes. Nine years later, while working at Clayton State College in Georgia, he met the first Georgian to be exonerated by DNA evidence. Calvin Johnson Jr. had been convicted for two rapes close to the campus and served 17 years in prison before a new look at DNA evidence freed him. Hampikian wrote Exit to Freedom with Johnson, which tells the story of Johnson’s exoneration, and helped start the Georgia Innocence Project. “The work that Greg is doing is life changing, both for the individual who is exonerated and given an opportunity to live again, and for each person close to that individual who has suffered, too, all those years,” Johnson said. “Dr. Hampikian and I came together as two human beings with a common cause, to help educate the world by my experience.” Hampikian arrived at Boise State in 2004 and began serving as volunteer director of the Idaho Innocence Project two years later. The nonprofit offers free investigative help to the wrongfully convicted, assisting those in
Idaho and beyond. Thus far Hampikian and the project team have helped free 10 innocent prisoners and used DNA to lead investigators to the real perpetrators, in some cases decades after the crime. “Greg is a brilliant scientist and a great communicator, whose work is characterized by a relentless pursuit of the truth and exemplified by his involvement in the innocence movement,” said Boise attorney David Nevin, who works with Hampikian on Idaho Innocence Project cases.
The Knox Case In 2009, while in England for his son’s wedding, Hampikian gave a talk to lawyers on controversial DNA techniques where extremely low levels of DNA were being presented as evidence. After his talk, Hampikian was asked by a barrister if he would like to take a look at a London lowlevel DNA case dating back 30 years. He visited the crime lab where he was told he also should research a similar Italian case involving low-level DNA. That case had filled
the British tabloids, which referred to one of the defendants as “Foxy Knoxy.” The key piece of evidence implicating her was the victim’s DNA on a kitchen knife. That defendant was Amanda Knox, and after studying the evidence in her case, Hampikian was convinced she had been wrongly accused. Her trial was already under way when he began working with her defense team. He traveled to Rome and Perugia, met with the lawyers to go over evidence, watched videos of the evidence collection, performed a complete analysis of the DNA, and issued an independent report. Despite defense efforts, Knox was found guilty. “When Amanda was convicted, we went back to square one, to prepare for the appeal,” Hampikian said. Key was to show the Italian jury that the victim’s DNA found on the kitchen knife blade didn’t link Knox to the crime scene. To demonstrate how DNA can be inadvertently transferred – something that Hampkian believed had happened in the
Hampikian appeared on a number of national news programs during the Knox appeal, including several interviews on CNN. Above image from CNN.com, Oct. 3, 2011. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
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