PORTLAND (AP) – Maine’s highest court is weighing arguments on whether DNA testing should be performed on evidence preserved from a 1994 rape case.

Daniel Donovan of Monmouth, who is serving a 15-year sentence for gross sexual assault, is seeking the new testing under a 2001 law that allows post-conviction DNA analysis if an assailant’s identity is in question.

Donovan’s lawyer, Andrews Campbell, told the Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday that the tests could clear his client or help determine the victim’s credibility.

Kennebec County Deputy District Attorney Alan Kelley objected to the proposed testing, saying it would prove nothing because the victim identified Donovan as the man who raped her.

Kelley said the Legislature intended the statute to be used only in cases where the identity of a person convicted is based on circumstantial evidence.

“This is simply an attack on the credibility of the victim,” Kelley said.

Campbell said the analysis will show “whether the victim had intercourse with someone else” after she accused Donovan of raping her. Donovan, now 39, was arrested on June 22, 1994, after the victim called police claiming he raped her.

Donovan, the victim and another man who lived with them in a home in Monmouth were celebrating the victim’s divorce. The victim was taken to a hospital but refused to be examined at the time. She returned to the same hospital a few hours later and consented to an examination. That’s when the swab was taken.

Campbell maintains she went home and had intercourse with the other man to get evidence to charge Donovan.

Kelley said the swab was in evidence at the original trial as was a statement by a laboratory analyst who said the blood type involved did not match Donovan’s.

AP-ES-09-10-03 0218EDT

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