KEY POINTS:
The girl was raped and strangled. The boy was sexually assaulted and had nails driven into his head with a brick. The alleged murderer was convicted and spent 22 years in an American jail. But the evidence was shaky.
New Zealand, too, has had its share of dodgy convictions - and the American case has some similarities to that of David Bain. Like Bain, the accused child murderer, Byron Halsey from New Jersey, last week walked out of jail with his convictions quashed.
As in Bain's case, new evidence raised questions about whether a jury would find him guilty. And like Bain, Halsey has been granted a retrial but prosecutors are yet to decide if they will try him again or drop the charges.
The cases are different in the kinds of new evidence raised. For Halsey, it is DNA evidence. For Bain, accused of murdering his family in Dunedin in 1994, it is physical evidence.
But the big difference is that where Bain had only former All Black Joe Karam and a small band of supporters campaigning for him, Halsey had an organisation called the Innocence Project.
These organisations which aim to correct miscarriages of justice, have swept America and have been established in England and Australia and now one is being launched in New Zealand.
Those involved in the non-profit advocacy organisations painstakingly sift through evidence, sometimes decades old. In America, more than 200 people have been freed by Innocence Projects.
Those behind the New Zealand project, based at Victoria University in Wellington, say Bain's case demonstrates why such an organisation is needed here. They suspect there are quite a few people behind bars who should not be.
Says director Dr Maryanne Garry: "Legal and psychological research carried out here in New Zealand shows that wrongful convictions are of substantial concern in this country and must be addressed."
Garry is a psychologist who specialises in the unreliability of memory and has appeared as an expert witness in court.
Some of the research she is referring to is that of retired High Court judge Sir Thomas Thorpe who last year found there may be 20 people wrongly imprisoned in New Zealand.
New Zealand, Garry says, does not do a good job regarding the collection of physical or psychological evidence. She describes the cases of convicted killers David Tamihere and Scott Watson as "worrying" but says the project won't focus just on high profile cases. Targets are also the many "middle-tier" cases which the public never hears about.
"Here's a classic example," she says. "A guy's in a bar, a fight breaks out, the crowd moves out into the middle of the street. By the time the police show up the person who gets assaulted turns around and points to this guy and says 'that's him' because he looks familiar and he's totally convinced that's the guy.
"Now, this guy goes and gets convicted of an assault. It costs him thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars; maybe he serves time, maybe he loses his family, his livelihood. Those are some serious consequences that never even make the paper. These are the kinds of cases I think that we worry about in the Innocence Project."
As in America, the project will rely on the goodwill of experts from law, psychology and forensic science, who will give their time free.
And, as in America, it will rely on a lot of energetic and idealistic law students: "We've already been inundated; there's no other word for it, from law students who want to get involved in this."
Also involved are some heavyweights from America. On the advisory board is Professor Jacqueline McMurthrie from the University of Washington who was involved in setting up one of the founding Innocence Projects in America, and another is Professor Elizabeth Loftus, from the University of California-Irvine, one of the leading memory experts in the world.
Also on the advisory board, and a driving force behind the project, is New Zealand defence lawyer, John Rowan, QC.
Rowan's interest partly stems from research into the reasons people are wrongly convicted.
He says a report from the United States Department for Justice, called Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science, is an eye-opener.
The report showed that in the seven years from 1989 about 20 per cent of sexual assault cases referred to the FBI found the primary suspect was excluded by forensic DNA testing, where results could be obtained.
There were five main reasons for wrongful conviction: mistaken eyewitness identification; coerced confessions; law enforcement misconduct; unreliable forensic laboratory work; and ineffective representation by counsel.
Rowan doubts the reasons would be any different here. The report was so dramatic a number of states suspended the death penalty.
"A lot of governors just said we're not going to sign any more warrants for death penalty cases, because if it's one in five it's the sort of stuff that might keep you awake at night."
Rowan would not go into the Bain case but says it is a dramatic example of why an Innocence Project is needed in this country, because in some aspects of Bain's case one or more of the five reasons for wrongful conviction may have been important.
The Innocence Project will have to have an open mind about cases, he says, but will also have to pick and choose carefully. He knows from experience that many people serving long sentences believe they have been wrongfully convicted.
"I probably get almost a letter or a request a week to look at people's cases in the Court of Appeal."
From time to time he re-examines a case and sometimes the Court of Appeal appoints senior lawyers to take a look at a case.
"But what we've lacked is a sort of facility or a mechanism, a place where people can go and senior people, in an interdisciplinary way, can have a good hard look at what happened.
"To do this you've got to plug into the science, you've got to plug into the psychology and you have to plug into the law to do the job."
The project could in part fill the gap Sir Thomas Thorpe identified when the retired judge called for an independent body of experts to be set up to examine miscarriage of justice cases.
Maryanne Garry says the project is already hearing about potential cases and is currently screening them.
Not everyone sitting in jail convicted of a crime they didn't commit has a Joe Karam, she says. "We want those people to know that the Innocence Project is on their side."
