DNA exonerates 72-year-old, overturns longest wrongful conviction in US, officials say
Officers in search of a rape suspect arrested Leonard Mack 48 years ago — when he matched the description of a Black man wearing an earring and a hat in New York, officials said.
Hours before his arrest May 23, 1975, two female high school students were held at gunpoint and forced into the woods where they were tied, gagged and blindfolded by an unknown perpetrator in Greenburgh, about 20 miles northeast of Manhattan in New York City, according to prosecutors.
The suspect raped one student twice and tried to sexually assault the other girl, prosecutors said.
After Westchester County Parkway Police arrested Mack on the Bronx River Parkway, he was convicted of first-degree rape and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon — and later sentenced April 27, 1976, to serve up to 15 years in prison in New York, according to officials.
Although Mack, 72, maintained his innocence in prison, his conviction was never overturned and he spent over seven years in prison, officials said.
Now, new DNA evidence obtained this year exonerates Mack, who lives in South Carolina, and points to a new suspect who officials said has confessed to his role in the 1975 rape case, the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office announced in a Sept. 5 news release.
District Attorney Miriam E. Rocah and the Innocence Project, a nonprofit dedicated to helping wrongfully convicted individuals with DNA testing, are asking the court to vacate Mack’s conviction, the release said.
If Mack’s conviction is officially overturned by the courts, it will be the longest wrongful conviction to be vacated in the U.S. as result of new DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project.
“I never gave up hope; I never threw in the towel,” Mack told the Rockland/Westchester Journal News. “I know it’s here but I just can’t believe it’s actually happened. That finally it’s being shown that I didn’t commit this crime 48 years ago.”
When Mack was arrested in the case, he was a 23-year-old Vietnam War veteran working toward his GED diploma and a father of two children, according to the newspaper.
Mack told The Journal News he had an alibi and said he was with his girlfriend when the rape occurred.
“I wanted to know why would you do that to a Vietnam veteran, a person who fought for his country and now this is what you do to me,” he said, according to the newspaper. “I came home and you falsely accuse me and you throw me in prison?”
DNA testing identifies new suspect
In August 2022, the Innocence Project asked the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office to review Mack’s case, officials said.
An investigation by the office’s Conviction Review Unit ensued and revealed “eyewitness identifications were tainted by problematic and suggestive procedures used by the police,” according to the district attorney’s office.
New DNA testing took place after investigators learned evidence from the 1975 rape was still preserved, according to the release.
When the lab results came back this year, Mack’s DNA wasn’t a match and excluded him as a suspect, officials said.
Instead, the DNA test results led investigators to a man in Westchester who was convicted of rape in June 1975 in Queens — two weeks after Mack’s arrest, according to officials.
The man, who wasn’t identified in the news release, was also convicted of a sex crime in Greenburgh in 2004, officials said.
A district attorney’s office investigator interviewed the man, who officials said confessed to the May 23, 1975 rape in Greenburgh.
Due to state statute of limitations, the man cannot be prosecuted for the crime, officials said.
Despite this, he is in custody and is being prosecuted for not registering as a sex offender in connection with the 2004 sex crime, according to officials.
Susan Friedman, an Innocence Project attorney representing Mack, said in a statement that several “witness misidentifications” led to Mack’s wrongful conviction.
“Mr. Mack has lived with the stigma of this wrongful conviction for nearly five decades,” Friedman said in the news release. “His courage and determination are why we now have indisputable scientific evidence that proves he is innocent.”
Out of 3,200 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations, an online archive documenting U.S. exonerations since 1989, 53% of exonerees are Black individuals, according to a September 2022 report.
This suggests “Black Americans are seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes,” the report says.
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