A 72-year-old African American man was acquitted by a New York-area court on Tuesday thanks to new DNA evidence of a 1975 rape for which he was imprisoned for more than seven years, one of the oldest recognized miscarriages of justice in the United States United States.
According to the Innocence Project, which along with the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office referred the matter to the highest court in New York State, this is actually the oldest known conviction made based on evidence in the United States. DNA, from a total of more than 3,300 people have been exonerated since 1989.
Leonard Mack, who walked with a cane Tuesday and appeared emotional at the hearing, was about 20 years old when he was arrested on May 22, 1975, for the rape of a high school girl who was walking with him just hours earlier Friend in the small town of Greenburgh in the same county.
“Despite maintaining his innocence and providing witnesses to support his alibi,” Leonard Mack, who had served in the Vietnam War, was sentenced a year later to seven years in state prison for rape and weapons possession, according to the indictment, and one-half to fifteen years in state prison.
The two victims were pressured into recognizing him after “identifications were tainted by biased and problematic police methods,” the prosecutor’s office stressed. Methods that black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to fall victim to, according to the Innocence Project.
Leonard Mack, who spent more than seven years in prison and lives in the southern United States, always fought for his innocence. But it was not until 2022 that the public prosecutor’s office reopened the case and carried out analyzes based on remaining DNA traces on a victim’s underwear.
The analyzes exonerated him and, on the contrary, made it possible to confuse another suspect who was in prison in a different case. He admitted the rape in 1975 but can no longer be convicted because of the statute of limitations.
“Now I can truly say that I am free,” Leonard Mack said through tears, according to excerpts from the hearing at the White Plains court broadcast by American media.
According to the 2022 report of the National Registry of Exonerations, a project led by several American universities, Black people represent 13% of the population in the United States but have accounted for 53% of declarations of innocence following miscarriages of justice since 1989.