Man exonerated of rape conviction after 33 years in jail

Score another one for The Innocence Project! Story here. Excerpt:

'ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — A mentally ill New York man who spent nearly six years behind bars for a 1976 rape he insisted he didn't commit was exonerated Thursday after DNA testing showed he was innocent.

The conviction of Freddie Peacock of Rochester, now 60, was based on a false confession police attributed to him just hours after the early morning rape of a 24-year-old woman who lived in the same apartment building.

State Judge David Egan vacated the conviction after lawyers for Peacock and Monroe County prosecutors agreed DNA evidence obtained from the victim's underwear and from Peacock in 2008 proved he wasn't the rapist.
...
Peter Neufeld, the Innocence Project's co-director, said that with Peacock's exoneration, "New York becomes the nation's capital of false confessions."

Since 2002, 10 people in New York have been exonerated through DNA testing after false confessions or admissions led to wrongful convictions. That accounts for one-third of all DNA exonerations nationwide since 2002, the group said.
...
"Freddie didn't just happen to get wrongly convicted," Neufeld said. "It doesn't work that way. There were two police officers that questioned him and attributed a statement to him, 'I did it' — a bare bones confession at best."

The statement wasn't written down, videotaped, audiotaped or "recorded in any way and he didn't sign anything," Neufeld said in calling for mandatory recording of all serious crime interrogations in New York.'

Take a look at the local story, which shows the man's picture. Is it me or are a lot of these exonerated men also black? Seems the fastest way to get found guilty of rape on the flimsiest of evidence, aside from being male, is being black. But there is one thing everyone summarily thrown into jail and presumed guilty of any given purported crime against a female have in common: they are all men.

When was the last time you heard of a Miss A tossed into jail because a Miss B accused her of, say, stealing something from her, or indeed, of a sexual assault? Never. Not once.