Guandique repeatedly denied involvement in her murder, and prosecutors acknowledged a lack of DNAevidence linking Guandique to the crime and a lack of witnesses.
If the justices rule for King, more than 1 million DNA profiles that have been stored in a federal database for matching with future crime scene evidence may have to be purged and others will never be collected, leading some repeat offenders to go free, advocates say.
The police have assembled a case against the accused men based on 80 witnesses, information gleaned from confessions of some of the accused, and DNAevidence linking all of the alleged perpetrators to the crime, according to a police document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.