Afrobasic:


40 years? I bet it was his colour they used to convict him.

cococandy:
Are they going to compensate him after making him spend the better part lf his life in prison?

cococandy:
Are they going to compensate him after making him spend the better part lf his life in prison?

newsnow:
Emotion flow, when a 70-year-old man from North Carolina was released after serving four decades in prison for a crime he did not commit.Read more...

A panel of judges has found Joseph Sledge was wrongly convicted in the stabbing deaths of a mother and daughter nearly four decades ago.

After his release on Friday, the 70-year-old said he was looking forward to sleeping in a real bed and maybe swimming in a pool.

Sledge was sentenced to life in prison in the September 1976 slayings of Josephine Davis and her daughter, Aileen. They were found stabbed to death in their home in Elizabethtown, a day after Sledge had escaped from a prison work farm where he was serving time for larceny.

The judges heard from a DNA expert who said none of the evidence collected in the case matched Joseph Sledge. A district attorney apologized to Sledge and promised to reopen the case into the 1976 slayings.

"The system has made a mistake," district attorney Jon David said. "The wrong man is in prison."

After the judges' decision was announced, Sledge was still for a moment, then hugged his lawyer and family members who attended the hearing.

His nephew Maurice Sledge said the family planned to take him to Savannah, Georgia, to live with one of Joseph Sledge's brothers.

Sledge is the eighth person exonerated after the state set up the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, the only state-run investigative agency of its kind. The commission found there was enough doubt to review Sledge's case, and the state Supreme Court appointed the three judges to hear it.

In addition to fingerprints, DNA and hair gathered at the scene that didn't belong to Sledge, a key jailhouse informant, Herman Baker, signed an affidavit in 2013 recanting trial testimony. Baker said he lied at the 1978 trial after being promised leniency in his own drug case and he said he'd been coached by authorities on what to say.NEWSNOWAFRICA.COM

As great as the U.S. is, there is race and gender issues. There is a lot of prosecutorial misconduct and police officers manufacturing evidence and framing witnesses. Good news is that there are those that continue to work in search of truth for all. In Nigeria there are civil rights luminaries like Falana etc who are doing same. Those years can never be returned, but hopefully the system will find a way to compensate him and his family.



Source: The Telegraph