One minute, I was walking to the store. The next, I became a suspect in a series of rapes in Richmond, Virginia — because someone got me confused with another guy.
From January 3 to February 1, 1984, five white women were victims of rape or attempted rape by a young black male. I happened to be walking down the street when one of the victims saw me and mistakenly identified me as her attacker.
Four more victims eventually picked my photo based on a biased identification procedure, even though I knew nothing about the attacks. The police even told one of the victims that they had a suspect, so she knew that she was supposed to pick someone from the photos. I was convicted of these horrible crimes I didn’t do, based mostly on the inaccurate testimony of these eyewitnesses.
Stories like mine happen a lot more than you think. Mistaken eyewitness identifications are the leading contributing cause of wrongful convictions. Nationally, 69% of DNA exonerations — 252 out of 367 cases — have involved eyewitness misidentification.
In my case, after Governor Mark Warner ordered a review of cases between 1973 and 1988, it was discovered that DNA evidence recovered from one of the victims matched a man named Leon Davis. He attacked more than a dozen women after I was incarcerated, and was later arrested on multiple counts of rape. This proved my innocence.
It took 27 years for me to finally be released, and on December 6, 2011, I was fully exonerated with the help of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and the Innocence Project.
It’s very important that more people know about things like eyewitness misidentification and we work to fix the problems in our system that send innocent people like me to prison. I also work closely with the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and the Innocence Project to pass laws and policies that ensure that law enforcement are using scientifically supported identification procedures, to make sure others do not go through the nightmare that I did.
The Innocence Project exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. www.innocenceproject.org
