True-crime podcast reveals Jane Dorotik's 20-year fight for justice
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Twenty-four years after she was convicted of murdering her husband and four years after being exonerated, Jane Dorotik's story is now the subject of a seven-part, true-crime podcast by KPBS.
Why it matters: Dorotik's wrongful conviction relied on forensic evidence that's increasingly recognized as bad science, and since being freed with the help of the Innocence Project, she has become a prison-reform advocate.
Driving the news: KPBS released all seven parts of "Free Jane" this week, after Claire Trageser began reporting out the story even before Dorotik's exoneration in summer 2020.
- KPBS reporter Katie Hyson hosts the series.
Flashback: Bob Dorotik was 55 when he went for a run in Valley Center on Feb. 13, 2000. His bloody, strangled body was found on his usual route the next morning. Three days later, police arrested Jane.
- Her attorney accepted the narrative told by forensic evidence like tire tracks and blood-spatter analysis but offered an alternative suspect: Claire Dorotik, the couple's 24-year-old daughter.
Zoom in: From prison, Jane wrote to Innocence Project lawyers, who took up her case in 2014 after determining evidence in the trial appeared to rely on faulty scientific analyses.
- She was granted conditional release in April 2020 over age-related COVID concerns, and a Superior Court judge vacated her conviction a few months later, when she was 73.
What she's saying: Trageser said two threads drew her to the story, which she started considering for a deep dive before Jane's release.
- "It highlighted a lot of outdated 'scientific' techniques taken as unequivocal proof, that people are now recognizing aren't," she told Axios.
- "The other is, she was a middle-class woman who was into riding horses and thought the criminal-justice system worked just fine," Trageser said. "Then, she saw her own injustice and went into prison and met other women who — even those who were guilty — had still experienced massive injustice in the system."
The big picture: Jane's case revealed "shoddy practices" by the San Diego County sheriff's crime lab, in addition to general problems with the basic science underlying the forensic analyses.
The bottom line: Bob's murder remains unsolved and is likely to stay that way.
- All the remaining DNA evidence in the case was used to exonerate his wife.