The Second Department’s decision noted that only a small amount of DNA was used in the testing, after some DNA was scraped from a shoe found near the crime scene. The justices also wrote that the “high-sensitivity” DNA analysis used by the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office had been developed by OCME to analyze DNA samples that were smaller than the minimum DNA amount—100 picograms—needed for traditional testing. Then they pointed out that an OCME criminologist had “admitted” at trial that in developing high-sensitivity testing, OCME had “tweaked the protocols” of DNA testing.

Further, they wrote that the DNA was found to be a “nondeductible mixture.” That meant, they wrote, that it contained the DNA of two or more persons. And they said that OMCE’s “likelihood ratio” result of 133—the number indicating how likely it was that Herskovic was one of the two contributors to the sneaker’s DNA—was “a relatively insubstantial number.”

Aldea said that the high-sensitivity DNA evidence in Herskovic’s case “was the only evidence that was used to convict a man of a crime, of a felony, and to arrest him and take him away from his family.”

Said Herskovic on Thursday, while standing beside his lawyer in the 19th-floor hallway and speaking of the recent years in his life, “It wasn’t easy. … I lost everything.”

Then, he paused and said, “I hope to start anew.”