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 man did not rape her, but ejaculated on her clothing. She described the man as Latino with no shirt and no hair. She said the second perpetrator never entered her bedroom.
Within minutes of the incident, a police officer stopped several Cuban-American men who were in the parking lot of a nearby Tom Thumb convenience store. Only 27-year-old Orlando Boquete had no hair and no shirt. The police brought the victim to the scene. From a distance of 20 feet, she identified Boquete as her attacker as he sat in a police car. Boquete had a large, black mustache at the time. After identifying Boquete, the victim added to her description that the attacker had a mustache. The woman also identified a second man in that group at the convenience store as the man who had not entered her room. That man was not charged.
On June 25, 1982, Boquete was charged with burglary and attempted sexual battery. He went to trial in Monroe County Circuit Court in December of 1982. The victim identified 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 with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement crime laboratory, testified that he 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.
McNamara told the jury that both Boquete and the victim were Type O non-secretors, meaning their blood type could not be identified from bodily fluids. Boquete was not the source of the Type A blood, but McNamara did not say he was excluded. Instead, McNamara said the spots with no markers could have come from Boquete and 20 percent of the population.
Boquete testified that he had been home the entire night with his family, watching sports on television, until he went to the convenience store with his cousins.
On January 3, 1983, a jury convicted Boquete of burglary and attempted sexual assault. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the burglary conviction and a concurrent sentence of five years for the attempted sexual assault conviction.
In February 1985, Boquete escaped from prison. He was arrested in July 1995 and sent back to prison.
In 2000, DNA testign posthumously exonerated Frank Lee Smith of murder and rape convictions in Broward County, Florida. The Florida Legislature then passed a law allowing prisoners to request DNA testing as long as the requests were filed by January 1, 2003.
Boquete, like hundreds of other prisoners across the United States, wrote to the Innocence Project seeking help. As the deadline approached, Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison sent forms to Boquete, which he used to file a motion seeking DNA testing on semen stains on the victim's clothing.
In 2004, the prosecution agreed to the DNA testing and the judge ordered that the evidence be sent to a lab. In November 2005, Orchid Cellmark, a private laboratory, conducted the tests. The testing concluded that Boquete could not be the source of the semen on the woman's underwear. No results were obtained for her pajama top.
Boquete's conviction was vacated on May 23, 2006, with the agreement of Monroe County State's Attorney Mark Kohl.
In dismissing the case, Judge Richard Payne said, “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.”
Boquete had been legally admitted to the United States in 1980, but he had never completed an application to gain permanent status. As a consequence, he was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At the urging of the prosecution and the Innocence Project, Boquete was released on August 22, 2006.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 12-28-2025
