Nearly five decades after he was falsely convicted of rape, Leonard Mack’s conviction was overturned by a New York judge after new DNA testing removed him as the offender and identified a different man who has since confessed to the crime, prosecutors stated.
According to the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, Mack, 72, spent more than seven years in jail after a jury convicted him guilty of raping a high school student in Greenburgh in 1975 and a related weapons conviction.
The district attorney’s office opened an investigation into Mack’s claim of innocence last year and conducted DNA testing that “conclusively excluded” Mack as the rapist. The office also discovered that the initial investigation and prosecution relied on eyewitness identifications that were “tainted by problematic and suggestive procedures used by the police,” according to a release.
Mack, whose exoneration occurred on his 72nd birthday, stated that he never gave up faith that his innocence would be established.
“Today has been a long time in the making. “I spent seven and a half years of my life in prison for a crime I did not commit, and I’ve lived with this injustice hanging over my head for nearly 50 years,” Mack said in a statement provided by the Innocence Project, an organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people and brought Mack’s case to the DA.
“Now that the truth has been revealed, I can finally breathe.” “I am finally free,” he declared.
According to the Innocence Project, Mack is a Vietnam War veteran who has lived in South Carolina with his wife for over 21 years. He stated that the erroneous conviction had an irreversible impact on his life.
“It changed the course of my life—everything from where I lived to my relationship with my family,” Mack explained.
According to the Innocence Project, Mack’s wrongful conviction is the longest to be overturned based on fresh DNA evidence, based on its knowledge of similar cases.
According to the district attorney’s office, investigators were able to connect the fresh DNA test results to a Westchester man who had been convicted of a separate rape in 1975 and another sex crime in 2004. According to the release, when probed by an investigator, the man confessed to the 1975 Greenburgh rape.
According to the district attorney’s office, the new suspect cannot be prosecuted for the 1975 offense due to New York’s statute of limitations, but he is now in custody and being prosecuted for failing to register as a sex offender in relation to the 2004 sex crime.
Westchester County District Attorney Miriam E. Rocah attributed Mack’s innocence to his “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,” Rocah said in a statement last week.
