A New York man who was convicted 47 years ago of a rape he didn’t commit was freed this week after new DNA testing proved his innocence and pointed to another suspect who has now confessed to the crime, authorities said.
Leonard Mack was found guilty of rape and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon after being accused of raping a high school girl in Greenburgh, N.Y., in 1975, per a
statement from the Innocence Project, a non-profit organization that works to vindicate the wrongly convicted.
Mack, who is a Vietnam War veteran and has lived with his wife in South Carolina for nearly 21 years, spent more than seven years in state prison for the crime.
“I never lost hope that one day that I would be proven innocent,” Mack said in the organization's statement following his release on Tuesday, which also fell on his 72nd birthday.
“Now the truth has come to light and I can finally breathe,” he added. “I am finally free.”
The Westchester County District Attorney’s Office said in a
press release that new testing of DNA evidence pulled from the crime scene nearly five decades ago has “conclusively excluded” Mack as the perpetrator — and noted that a match returned to a Westchester man who was convicted of a June 1975 rape in Queens, just two weeks after the rape in Greenburgh, and a 2004 sex crime in Greenburgh.
The man confessed to committing the 1975 Greenburgh rape when interviewed by an investigator.
According to the D.A.'s office, the convicted rapist will not be prosecuted for the 1975 crime due to New York's statute of limitations. He is currently being charged for failing to register as a sex offender in connection with the 2004 sex crime. He remains in custody.
"This is the longest wrongful conviction in U.S. history known to the Innocence Project to be overturned by DNA evidence,” prosecutors said.
Mack maintained that he was innocent, and his case was taken up by the Innocence Project in August 2022. The investigation found that eyewitness misidentification, along with racial bias and misleading forensic testimony presented by prosecutors at trial, played a central role in his wrongful conviction, the organization said.
"I lost seven-and-a-half years of my life in prison for a crime I did not commit and I have lived with this injustice hanging over my head for almost 50 years," Mack said.
On May 22, 1975, two 12th grade girls were dragged into the woods at gunpoint and tied up, gagged, and blinded before one of the victims was raped twice, according to the D.A.’s office.
The other girl broke free and ran to a nearby school where a teacher called the police, according to the Innocence Project. The Greenburgh Police Department had issued a call for officers to be on the lookout for a Black man in his early 20s.
Hours after the attack, which occurred in a predominantly White neighborhood, Mack was arrested by then-Westchester County Parkway Police on the Bronx River Parkway, per the organization.
Police indicated that Mack fit a suspect description of a Black man with an earring and wearing a hat, prosecutors said. Police had been told the suspect was also carrying a .22 or .32 caliber handgun, which officers claimed they found in the trunk of Mack’s car.
According to the Innocence Project, Mack's attire did not fit the victims' descriptions, and he denied being the suspect, an alibi that witnesses corroborated. Despite this, Mack was taken into police custody.
The girls, one of whom is legally blind, were then asked to identify Mack in a series of “highly suggestive and problematic identification procedures,” including photo arrays and lineups, the organization said.
During Mack’s trial, prosecutors dismissed serological evidence from the victim’s underwear which revealed that the assailant was blood type A, which is not Mack’s blood type.
A forensic analyst with the State “incorrectly suggested that the victim may have been the source of the biological evidence,” leading to Mack’s conviction, according to the Innocence Project.
“Eyewitness misidentification, as in this case, is the leading contributing factor of wrongful convictions and has contributed to 64% of the Innocence Project’s 245 exonerations and releases,” the organization said.
Westchester County District Attorney Miriam E. Rocah attributed Mack's exoneration to the dedication of her office's independent Conviction Review Unit and "Mack's unwavering strength fighting to clear his name for almost 50 years."
“This exoneration confirms that wrongful convictions are not only harmful to the wrongly convicted but also make us all less safe.”
Source:
people.com, Nicole Acosta, September 8, 2023
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
