EL PASO, Texas (AP) - A judge has acquitted a Mississippi man on trial in the stabbing death of an El Paso woman 46 years ago.
State District Judge Gonzalo Garcia granted the directed verdict Wednesday in El Paso of not guilty in the case against Willie James Johnson. That’s after the 71-year-old Mississippi man’s attorney argued that prosecutors failed to provide sufficient evidence to convict Johnson of first-degree murder in the 1970 death of 21-year-old Doris Rivers. The woman was found dead at her central El Paso apartment.
The former Fort Bliss soldier had been arrested in 2015.
Prosecutors tried to submit DNA evidence that they said implicated Johnson. Garcia ruled the evidence inadmissible because a chain of custody for it wasn’t established, that it had been stored improperly and all witnesses are dead.
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