New DNA evidence has allowed a US man who spent seven and a half years in jail for a rape he did not commit to be exonerated almost five decades later, according to officials.
In 1975, a young girl was raped by Leonard Mack, who is now 72, as she walked home from school with another female in Greenburgh, New York.
Shortly after announcing a search for a Black suspect in the mostly white area, Mack, an African American, was taken into custody.
Following an Innocence Project campaign, DNA evidence that was 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.
According to the Innocence Project, this was the longest-standing wrongful conviction in US history to be vacated by DNA evidence, according to the district attorney’s office, which credited Mack’s “unwavering strength” in his almost 50-year effort to clear his reputation.
Since 1989, 575 wrongfully convicted individuals have been exonerated based on fresh DNA testing, 35 of them were doing so while awaiting death, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Researchers claim that innocent white persons are far less likely to be wrongfully convicted than Black suspects.
More than half of the 3,300 persons who had their convictions overturned between 1989 and 2022 were Black, despite the fact that the percentage of Black people in the US as a whole is just 13.6%, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Mack reacted to being cleared by saying, “I am at last free.”
