Outrage: The Peg Cuttino Story

Trail of Trials

By that time, Cooper said, the case already has a formidable history. In fact, almost every other year, between 1973 and 1994, the case had surfaced in one way or another. After Pierce's conviction in 1973, an appeal was filed and rejected in 1974, two more unsuccessful petitions were filed in 1975, another in 1978.

Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins mugshot

Pierce again filed for post conviction relief in 1981, a petition in which the serial killer Pee Wee Gaskins claimed responsibility for the killings. That petition lingered until it was finally killed in 1985 after the court ruled that Gaskins was lying. Yet another futile petition was filed in 1988.

In each of those case, the court rejected Pierce's plea that his conviction be overturned, but each of those cases raised additional questions about the validity of the state's case against Pierce and further fueled the controversy surrounding it.

Under South Carolina law, it is an uphill battle to continue the appeals process once a petition has been rejected. In fact, technically, "the law only allows you one," Cooper said. There is, however, an exception. That exception kicks in when there is new evidence, discovered after a conviction and appeal that could change the outcome of the case.

In the early 1990s, Pierce, with his attorneys' approval, provided just such evidence himself. He agreed to provide a DNA sample.

Ken Young, the former prosecutor who is now handling Pierce's defense, has long maintained that the forensic evidence in the case is the key to proving Pierce's innocence, at least in connection with the Cuttino case.

In an interview with the Crime Library earlier this month, Young maintained, as he has all along, that blood and semen samples taken from Cuttino and tested after her slaying, could have proved that the young girl was not killed on Dec. 18, the day she was abducted, as prosecutors had alleged, but instead, the maturity of the sperm indicated that she had not died until at least Dec. 25. The problem, he argued, was that Pierce's counsel, young and inexperienced at the time, was ineffective because it structured the bulk of its case on an alibi for Pierce, and didn't exploit the forensic evidence to undermine the prosecution.

With the advances of DNA testing in the years since the first trial, Pierce's defense was confident that a clear and convincing case could be made that Pierce was innocent.

In 1994, the defense persuaded Cooper to take up that argument.