After three trials, twin is found guilty in 2001 rape

A Suffolk County jury yesterday convicted a former Dorchester man of rape following two previous trials that ended in hung juries after his lawyer argued that DNA evidence could have come from his identical twin.

After deliberating only five hours, the jury found Darrin Fernandez, 31, guilty of three counts of rape, two counts of indecent assault and battery, and other charges in connection with the April 2001 attack on a young woman in her home on Peverell Street in Dorchester.

Fernandez, a tall, goateed man already serving a 10- to 15-year prison sentence in connection with a 2000 rape in the same neighborhood, stood with his hands clasped behind him as the forewoman read the verdict but appeared impassive. He is to be sentenced March 31.

His victim, a 34-year-old teller supervisor who lives in Chicago, was in Illinois yesterday. She told a victim-witness advocate in the Suffolk district attorney's office that, after testifying three times about the rape, she was ''glad this is over," said the advocate.

She plans to return to Boston to tell the sentencing judge about the impact the rape had on her life.

The verdict was a strikingly different outcome from Fernandez's two previous trials for the rape. The attack occurred shortly after midnight on April 27, 2001, when a man climbed a fire escape leading to a second-story porch of a house, awakened a woman inside her apartment, and raped her.

In each of the earlier trials, the jury deliberated several days before telling the judge it was deadlocked. The difference this time, said the district attorney's office and criminal law specialists, was that prosecutors asked Superior Court Judge Raymond J. Brassard to let them present evidence that Fernandez had committed four similar break-ins and several sexual assaults in the neighborhood over a 10-month period, including the one for which he had been convicted.

Under state law, juries are usually barred from hearing evidence that a defendant has committed other crimes because it is prejudicial. But Assistant District Attorney David A. Deakin persuaded Brassard to let him present the evidence -- though nothing about convictions -- because it illustrated a pattern of behavior and refuted the defendant's theory that Fernandez's identical twin, Damien, , could have been the source of the DNA. Identical twins have the same DNA.

The woman whom Fernandez had previously been convicted of raping at her parents' home on Hecla Street shortly after midnight on Aug. 26, 2000, wept in relief after the jury convicted Fernandez yesterday in his third trial for the Peverell Street rape.

''It was disgusting that he got off [twice before], disgusting," said the woman, now 27, who testified at this most recent trial and gave her first name, Jennifer, and allowed a photograph to be taken. ''And now he's not going anywhere. . . . I'm psyched."

The Boston Globe does not name or photograph rape victims without their consent.

Robert J. Zanello, who defended Fernandez at all four trials, left Suffolk Superior Court after the verdict and did not return phone calls. He said at the start of the trial that Brassard's decision to allow the evidence of other crime was a major blow to the defense. Nonetheless, in his closing argument to the jury Tuesday, he said ''there's no getting around" the fact that the DNA evidence -- semen left on the rape victim's pillowcase -- could have come from either twin.

Deakin had urged the jury to focus not on the DNA evidence but on Fernandez's actions in the other crimes -- the defendant's ''criminal signature," as the prosecutor put it -- to distinguish him from his twin. He said Darrin Fernandez, a one-time house painter, had broken into several homes where women were asleep or going to sleep around midnight, made sexually suggestive remarks to several of them, raped two, tried to rape another, and slapped another on the buttocks. All the incidents occurred within 1 1/2 miles from where Fernandez lived.

Damien Fernandez testified at all the rape trials and said he was living outside Boston at the time of the attacks. Damien has a speech impediment while his brother does not, Deakin said. Darrin has a tattoo that reads ''twinz" on his left arm, while Damien has no such tattoo.

But Zanello told jurors that Damien had a criminal record and had used his brother's driver's license to impersonate him.

Over the past decade, DNA evidence has become the gold standard for linking suspects to crimes and for clearing the wrongly convicted. But it has shortcomings, particularly in the rare cases involving identical twins.

Dr. Frederick R. Bieber, a medical geneticist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, said recently that he was aware of five to 10 criminal cases in the United States in recent years in which DNA evidence was unable to definitively link a defendant to a crime because the individual has an identical twin.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com