DNA

Tuan Anh Nguyen was born on September 11, 1969, in Saigon, Vietnam, to a Vietnamese mother and Joseph Boulais, a United States citizen employed by a corporation in Vietnam. Boulais and Nguyen's mother were not married. After their relationship ended, Nguyen lived for a time with the family of Boulais's new Vietnamese girlfriend. In June 1975, when Nguyen was almost six years old, he came to the United States with his father. He became a lawful permanent resident and was raised in Texas by Boulais. In 1992, at age 22, Nguyen pleaded guilty in a Texas state court to two counts of sexual assault on a child and was sentenced to eight years in prison on each count. Three years later, the Immigration and Naturalization Service initiated deportation proceedings against him as an alien convicted of two crimes involving moral turpitude and an aggravated felony. At his deportation hearing Nguyen testified that he was a citizen of Vietnam. The Immigration Judge found him deportable. Nguyen appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals. In 1998, while the appeal was pending, Boulais obtained an order of parentage from a Texas court based on DNA testing that showed a 99.98 percent probability of paternity; Nguyen was then 28 years old. The Board dismissed the appeal because Nguyen had failed to establish compliance with 8 U.S.C. §1409(a). Nguyen and Boulais appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which rejected their constitutional challenge to §1409(a). The Supreme Court granted certiorari.

On March 2, 1998, Patrick Kennedy called 911 at 9:18 a.m. to report that his eight-year-old stepdaughter L.H. had been raped in the side yard by two neighborhood boys who fled on a blue bicycle. Police arrived between 9:20 and 9:30 a.m. and found L.H. on her bed wrapped in a bloody blanket. She was bleeding profusely from severe vaginal injuries that included a laceration separating her cervix from the vagina and a torn perineum requiring emergency surgery at Children's Hospital. Kennedy initially told investigators that L.H. had been dragged from the garage to the yard. Both L.H. and Kennedy maintained this account in early interviews, including a three-hour videotaped session with a psychologist days after the assault. Physical evidence soon contradicted the yard account. The grass showed little disturbance except for coagulated blood. A bicycle found nearby had flat tires and spider webs. Blood was discovered on the underside of L.H.'s mattress inside the home. Kennedy had also made telephone calls before 7:37 a.m. inquiring how to remove blood from carpet. He had called a cleaning service. He did not contact 911 until roughly 9:18 a.m. Eight days after the crime, Kennedy was arrested. About a month later L.H. was removed from her mother's custody. On June 22, 1998, she first told her mother that Kennedy had raped her. In December 1999 she recorded a videotaped accusation at the Child Advocacy Center. The State charged Kennedy with aggravated rape of a child under twelve under La. Stat. Ann. § 14:42 and sought the death penalty. The trial began in August 2003 when L.H. was thirteen. She testified that Kennedy had been on top of her, had given her orange juice with chopped pills afterward, and had instructed her to blame neighborhood boys. The jury convicted Kennedy of aggravated rape. After hearing testimony from another child about prior sexual abuse by Kennedy, the jury unanimously sentenced him to death. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence in 2007. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari in 2008.