NEW YORK: A US man who served seven and a half years in prison for a rape he did not commit has been cleared nearly five decades later thanks to new DNA evidence, authorities said.

Leonard Mack, now 72, was arrested in 1975, in Greenburgh, New York state, after the rape of a teenage girl, who had been walking home from school with another girl.

Police announced a search for a Black suspect in the mostly white neighbourhood and shortly after picked up Mack, who is African American.

After a campaign by the Innocence Project, DNA evidence not available at the time has “conclusively excluded 72-year-old Mr Mack as the perpetrator and identified a convicted sex offender, who has now confessed to the rape,” the Westchester County prosecutor’s office said. “This is the longest wrongful conviction in US history known to the Innocence Project to be overturned by DNA evidence,” the district attorney’s office said, citing Mack’s “unwavering strength fighting to clear his name for almost 50 years.”

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 575 wrongly convicted people have been cleared based on new DNA tests since 1989 — 35 of them while waiting for execution.

Published in Dawn, September 7th, 2023