TULSA, Okla. — An Oklahoma inmate will stay behind bars after the Court of Criminal Appeals upheld his conviction.
The case is important because it involves a type of DNA testing that had never been considered in Oklahoma, and will likely pave the way for future cases.
Patrick Napoleon was sentenced to 65 years in prison for the 2017 random stabbing of a woman outside of Hillcrest Medical Center.
WATCH: Conviction upheld:
She had been visiting a relative in the hospital. To take a break, she had walked across the street to get a snack from the nearby QuikTrip. On her way back, a witness says Napoleon appeared to come out of nowhere.
“He had a sock over his arm and a knife in his hand,” said John Tjeerdsma, Tulsa County Assistant District Attorney, who prosecuted the case. “According to testimony, had she not been stabbed at the hospital, she wouldn’t have made it.”
The court battle would last nine years, from a mistrial to pandemic delays and the appeal.
Thankfully for the victim, there were two witnesses: one who saw the stabbing and helped her get inside, and another who saw Napoleon throw the knife and sock away in the parking garage.
That second witness said the suspect was wearing camouflage pants. Although Napoleon was wearing black thermal pants when police later arrested him in a nearby neighborhood, camouflage pants were found discarded in the parking garage stairwell.
The DNA from the sock and pants was key evidence. However, standard testing methods returned inconclusive results because there was DNA from multiple people. The traditional method could not confirm the main contributor.
Tjeerdsma turned to a relatively newer method called probabilistic genotyping. It is used to interpret these more complex, or “mixed,” DNA samples to create a “likelihood ratio.”
“That kind of stranger danger is something we rarely see,” said Tjeerdsma. “I wanted to do right by her [the victim]. I wanted to make sure the jury had all the evidence they could consider.”
The results
The sock was roughly 32 trillion times more likely to be Napoleon, and the pants were roughly 1.18 quadrillion times more likely to be Napoleon.
Napoleon appealed, citing that the method was unreliable, among other reasons.
In December of 2025, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and the test.
“It’s a good feeling,” said Tjeerdsma. “It is certainly gratifying to see it from beginning to end, and see it through, all the way.”
While the method is new to Oklahoma courts, it is not new to investigators.
The FBI has been using probabilistic genotyping since 2015.
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