Bergen man serving life sentence for 2012 murder gets new trial over 'unreliable' DNA test
A state appeals court reversed the murder conviction of a Wood-Ridge man over unreliable DNA evidence that allegedly linked him to the victim – a North Jersey real estate agent – whose body was found beaten to death and set on fire in 2012.
Daniel Rochat, who was five years into a life sentence for the killing of 70-year-old Barbara Vernieri, is poised to get a new trial after the state court ruled last week that DNA found beneath Vernieri’s fingernails, purportedly belonging to Rochat, should have never been admitted in court.
The decision called into question the reliability of a controversial DNA test known as low copy number. Rochat's trial marked one of the first times a New Jersey jury considered DNA evidence produced by an LCN test.
While the test helped prosecutors place Rochat at the crime scene, the appeals court found that the results produced matches with a number of men, and that the technique was not generally accepted by the scientific community.
“This DNA evidence did not positively identify defendant,” according to the appellate decision. “Instead, it indicated defendant could not be excluded as a contributor and the profile would be expected to occur in 1 of 333 Caucasian individuals. We do not find this evidence to be overwhelming.”
Jail records show that Rochat, 46, was transferred from state prison to Bergen County Jail following the ruling. His attorney did not respond for comment.
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The Wood-Ridge man was convicted on a litany of charges in June 2017, including murder, aggravated arson and desecration of human remains. Prosecutors said he met Vernieri through his father, who was her boss at the Kurgan-Bergen Realtors in Rutherford, where Rochat worked as a handyman for some of the agency’s properties.
On Sept. 14, 2012, authorities said Rochat entered Vernieri's East Rutherford home and brutally beat her before he doused the house with gasoline and set it ablaze to destroy the evidence. His alleged motive was to steal Vernieri's jewelry because he owed an ex-girlfriend $11,000.
Prosecutors built a case against Rochat by extracting traces of blood in a kitchen sink more than a mile from the murder. His shoeprints were found inside Vernieri’s home. And phone records showed that his cellphone was near Vernieri's house and the commercial parking lot behind it at 10:39 a.m. the morning of the killing, though he told investigators that he slept until 11 a.m. that day.
But the case also hinged on a rare type of DNA evidence that was seldom used in court. At the time of Rochat's trial, only one lab in the country, run by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City, had used LCN for criminal prosecutions.
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The office ran the test in thousands of cases from 2005 until it was discontinued in 2017. During that time, the test won acclaim from New York prosecutors and forensic experts as a next-generation tool that could analyze DNA from just a few cells of biological material.
But critics, including the FBI, had argued that the results could be inconclusive.
A standard DNA test is run on 100 picograms, a unit of weight equal to one-trillionth of a gram of DNA, Julie Fry, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society's DNA unit, told The Record and Northjersey.com in 2018. LCN, however, analyzes samples with far fewer picograms, possibly in the single digits. The analysis is like making copies of copies at a Xerox machine, she said.
The appellate court ruled the state failed to prove that LCN was “generally accepted in the relevant scientific community” and thus was inadmissible in court.
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The ruling also tossed out hearsay testimony from Vernieri’s friend, who spoke with her on Sept. 12, 2012, two days before the killing. That night, Rochat knocked on Vernieri’s door, telling her that his car broke down and he knew that she lived nearby. Vernieri recounted to her friend that she invited him in and showed him around the house because he had never seen it, according to the decision. The visit surprised Vernieri, the friend recalled her saying, because Rochat had never been there before.
Tom Nobile covers Superior Court in Bergen County for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from criminal trials to local lawsuits and insightful analysis, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: nobile@northjersey.com
Twitter: @tomnobile
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Wood-Ridge man Daniel Rochat will get new trial for 2012 murder
