Brothers acquitted after 25 years in prison

Two Wisconsin brothers who spent the past 25 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of killing a woman in 1987 have been released after DNA evidence linked the killing to another suspect. The Wisconsin Innocence Project announced this on Friday.

David Bintz, 69, and his younger brother, Robert Bintz, 68, were sentenced to life in prison in 2000 after prosecutors said they killed 44-year-old Sandra Lison, a mother of two. Green Bay Press Gazette reports this.

Lison’s body was found on August 4, 1987, near a trail in the Machickanee Forest, about 30 miles from Green Bay. according to Robert Bintz’s proposal to leave. Detectives noticed that Lison’s panties and nylons had been removed and most of the buttons on her dress had been undone, and they determined that she had been beaten, strangled and sexually assaulted.

Semen was recovered from Lison’s body via vaginal swabs and from her dress, which was also stained with blood. This DNA evidence did not match the Bintzes, according to the Wisconsin Innocence Project, but after the case went cold for a while, the Brown County District Attorney’s Office finally charged the two brothers with her murder in 1998.

Prosecutors alleged during the Bintzes’ trial that the two killed Lison during a robbery at the Good Times Tavern, a bar where she worked, the night before her body was discovered, according to the motion to vacate..

Prosecutors also relied on the testimony of David Bintz’s cellmate at a prison where he had served time for an unrelated crime. The cellmate told guards about the nightmares David Bintz was having and claimed he screamed “make sure she’s dead” in his sleep, police said. Research Center for Genetic Genealogy. The cellmate also said that David Bintz later admitted to helping his brother kill Lison.

In their closing statement at the trial of the Bintz brothers, prosecutors argued that “it is clear that this was not a sexual assault” and that “there is no evidence” to suggest that the person who left the semen also killed Lison.

In 2023, the Great North Innocence Project, with the help of the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in New Jersey, discovered that DNA evidence found at the scene belonged to another man, William Joseph Hendricks. Hendricks, who is now deceased, had been convicted of similar crimes.

The brothers were released after a hearing on Wednesday.

Judge Donald Zuidmulder told the court that “Sandra Lison will rest in peace as her true killer is now known,” according to reports from NBC affiliate WGBA.

When asked how the brothers could be sentenced to life in prison despite the lack of evidence, Brown County District Attorney David Lasee told the newspaper that officials “followed the evidence they had at the time, and that that conviction was justified.”

Christopher Renz, Robert Bintz’s attorney, told JS in an email that he and his colleagues are happy about Robert’s vacation.

“It is an injustice that can never be fully corrected, but we are glad we received this relief when we could so that he can enjoy the freedom that should never have been taken away from him,” Renz said.

James Mayer of the Great North Innocence Project has launched a GoFundMe to help Robert Bintz rebuild his life after 25 years in prison.

“Innocent exonerates like Bobby leave prison with almost nothing – no savings, no bank account, no driver’s license, no credit or rental history, no recent employment history, no place to live,” Mayer wrote. “All this comes with the trauma of a quarter century of wrongful imprisonment.”