By now, I’m sure everyone knows that on Saturday the jury convicted Jerome Sydney Barrett of two counts of second-degree murder and sentenced him to 44 years in prison on both counts. WSMV Nashville reports that formal sentencing will occur in about a month, when I imagine we will hear whether the judge will make these consecutive or concurrent sentences. However, since the killer of nine-year-old Marcia Trimble is in his sixties, no one needs to worry about him ever getting out of prison.

Once again, the jury system has worked. I feel the conviction on second-degree, rather than first-degree, murder, shows how seriously most jurors take their responsibilities. How easy it would have been for them to “throw the book” at this monster. Instead, they used their reason and understood that there was no evidence of intent to kill. There was only evidence of intent to rape.

This trial raised several important issues, which I intend to explore in this forum, as soon as I have time. First is the issue of capital punishment: when Barrett committed this crime in 1975 the Supreme Court was pondering the constitutionality of capital punishment, and as a result he was not eligible for the death penalty in this trial. The second issue is DNA and how it’s used against defendants in front of juries and in favor of convicts in front of judges (to exonerate them): often it seems that trial judges don’t understand DNA evidence. I wonder why it is that appellate judges are able to understand when DNA ought be used to exonerate.

• Sidebar: An important DNA issue in the Barrett trial was a 1975 finding of semen in the victim’s vagina, which has since been proven not to be Barrett’s. In the trial, this was explained by saying the sample was contaminated in the lab. However, if you study the WSMV “timeline” of the crime, you discover that there was, in fact, substantial evidence that Barrett had an accomplice in several of the crimes he committed.

As you now know, not only did Barrett kill Marcia Trimble, he also killed a college student named Sarah Des Prez. But I have yet to hear anyone on TruTV point out (as WSMV Nashville has) that he confessed to the man they call “the jailhouse snitch” to killing a total of four people.

Barrett destroyed many lives—not only the lives of those he killed, but also (I imagine) the lives of those he raped—and the lives of the innocent men who lived almost 35 years under a cloud of suspicion for the crimes he committed.