GIST:  "Convicted of robbing and raping an 83-year-old woman, Joseph A. Buffey at 19 was no one’s idea of a choirboy. A marijuana smoker and high school dropout, he was out thieving on the night in question 11 years ago and broke into the Salvation Army near the woman’s home to steal the bell-ringing money.  He confessed to the rape and was sentenced to 70 years in the maximum security prison here in southern West Virginia where road names end in “Hollow” and “Creek” and coal is king. But for much of the past decade he has claimed that he was pressed into the confession and a plea deal by the police and his lawyer. He said he never entered the victim’s home, never touched her. After years of being ignored, Mr. Buffey recently learned that DNA tests from intimate material at the crime scene establish with certainty the identity of the rapist: another man incarcerated at a different state prison who had a history of assaulting women. If proceedings go as his lawyers hope, Mr. Buffey’s story will be one more in the several hundred exonerations nationwide brought about partly by new DNA techniques, many involving false confessions. But it took 18 months of litigation to get the state to test the DNA against its database of felons, and Mr. Buffey’s lawyers say his case is therefore something more: proof that laws are needed to remove the databases from the exclusive grip of prosecutors and law enforcement to make them available to defense lawyers."