Authorities said Tuesday that a US man who served forty-seven and a half years in prison for a rape he did not commit has been vindicated nearly five decades later thanks to fresh DNA evidence. Leonard Mack, now 72, was arrested in Greenburgh, New York, in 1975, following the rape of a teenage girl who was walking home from school with another female. Police announced a hunt for a Black suspect in the largely white neighborhood, and Mack, who is African American, was apprehended shortly after.
This is the longest wrongful conviction in US history
Following a campaign by the Innocence Project, DNA evidence not available at the time “conclusively excluded 72-year-old Mr. Mack as the perpetrator and identified a convicted sex offender, who has now confessed to the rape,” according to a statement from the Westchester County prosecutor’s office. “This is the longest wrongful conviction in US history known to the Innocence Project to be overturned by DNA evidence,” said the district attorney’s office, highlighting Mack’s “unwavering strength fighting to clear his name for almost 50 years.”
Since 1989, 575 wrongfully condemned people have been exonerated based on fresh DNA tests, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, 35 of whom were on death row. According to researchers, black suspects are considerably more likely than white people to be wrongfully convicted. Despite accounting for only 13.6 percent of the overall US population, the National Registry of Exonerations reported that more than half of the 3,300 persons whose convictions were reversed between 1989 and 2022 were Black. Only on JioSaavn.com can you listen to the most recent tunes. Mack said of his exoneration, “I am finally free.”
