13 Wrongful Convictions That Took Years to Undo

A wrongful conviction rarely comes down to one simple mistake. Sometimes an eyewitness identifies the wrong person. Sometimes a frightened teenager confesses to something that never happened. In other cases, prosecutors withhold evidence, investigators lock onto one suspect too early, or forensic testimony that once sounded convincing falls apart years later.

DNA testing has overturned some of the most famous wrongful convictions in American history, but it is only part of the story. Witness recantations, conviction review units, newly uncovered records, improved forensic science, and old-fashioned reinvestigation have also sent innocent people home after years or even decades behind bars.

These 13 cases span nearly 150 years. Some changed American law. Others exposed failures that should have been obvious much sooner. All of them show just how difficult it can be to undo a conviction once the justice system has decided someone is guilty.

Few wrongful-conviction cases are as well known as that of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise. The five teenagers were arrested after a woman was raped and brutally assaulted while jogging in New York's Central Park on April 19, 1989. After hours of interrogation, several gave statements implicating themselves and one another, even though the accounts conflicted on major details. All five were convicted in 1990.

The case finally collapsed in 2002 when Matias Reyes, already serving a lengthy prison sentence for other violent crimes, confessed that he alone had attacked the jogger. DNA from the rape kit matched Reyes and excluded the five men. Their convictions were vacated on Dec. 19, 2002, after they had served between roughly five and 11 years. New York City later agreed to a $41 million settlement with the five men. Today they are more commonly known as the Exonerated Five.

Henry McCollum was 19 and his half-brother Leon Brown was 15 when they were accused of raping and murdering 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in Red Springs, North Carolina, in 1983. Both brothers had intellectual disabilities. After lengthy interrogations, they signed confessions that contained details investigators had supplied to them. There was no physical evidence connecting either teenager to the crime, yet both were convicted and sentenced to death.

Their original convictions were overturned and they were retried, but McCollum was again sentenced to death while Brown received a life sentence for rape. Decades later, DNA from a cigarette butt found near Buie's body was matched to Roscoe Artis, a convicted murderer who lived close to the crime scene. McCollum and Brown were exonerated in 2014 after nearly 31 years in prison. North Carolina later paid each man $750,000, and in 2021 a federal jury returned a $75 million civil-rights verdict in their favor, although later appellate proceedings required adjustments for earlier payments and settlements.

Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam were convicted alongside Mujahid Abdul Halim in the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Both Aziz and Islam maintained that they were innocent. Halim eventually said the two men had not taken part in the killing and identified other participants, but their convictions remained in place for decades. Aziz was released on parole in 1985, Islam in 1987.

A reinvestigation by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and the Innocence Project uncovered exculpatory information that had not been disclosed to the defense and evidence supporting the men's alibis. Their convictions were vacated on Nov. 18, 2021, more than half a century after the murder. Islam had died in 2009 and was cleared posthumously. New York City and New York state later agreed to settlements totaling $36 million for Aziz and Islam's estate.

Thomas Raynard James lost more than three decades of his life because police were looking for another man with essentially the same name. Francis McKinnon was murdered during a robbery at his home in Miami's Coconut Grove neighborhood on Jan. 17, 1990. Investigators had received information about a suspect called Thomas or Tommy James. James' photograph wound up in a lineup, and eyewitness Dorothy Walton identified him.

No fingerprints from the crime scene matched James, but he was convicted in 1991 after a two-day trial and sentenced to life in prison. Walton later said she had identified the wrong man. A Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office reinvestigation concluded James was innocent, and his convictions were vacated on April 27, 2022, after 32 years and 52 days behind bars. Florida had previously blocked him from ordinary wrongful-incarceration compensation because of an unrelated prior felony, but a 2025 law removed that restriction and created a new filing window for some previously excluded exonerees.

Marvin Anderson was 18 when he was wrongly convicted of a 1982 rape, robbery, abduction, and sodomy in Virginia. Police focused on Anderson after the victim described her attacker as a Black man who had a white girlfriend. An officer knew Anderson was dating a white woman, obtained his photograph, and included it in a photo array. The victim picked Anderson and later identified him again in a lineup. An all-white jury convicted him and he received a 210-year sentence.

Another man later admitted involvement in the attack, but Anderson's conviction remained intact. DNA testing finally changed that. Testing obtained by the Innocence Project and Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project excluded Anderson and pointed to other men. Virginia Gov. Mark Warner granted Anderson a full pardon in August 2002 after Anderson had spent 15 years in prison and several more on parole. Virginia later provided a $200,000 lump-sum payment and $460,000 to purchase a lifetime annuity for him. Anderson went on to serve as a fire chief and joined the Innocence Project's board.

Lamar Johnson was convicted in 1995 of murdering Marcus Boyd in St. Louis the previous year. Two masked men had approached Boyd and another man, Greg Elking, and shot Boyd to death. The case against Johnson rested heavily on Elking's identification, even though Johnson maintained he was elsewhere when the shooting happened.

Elking eventually recanted, and one of the actual gunmen later admitted his own role while saying Johnson had nothing to do with the murder. A judge heard the evidence under a Missouri law that finally allowed prosecutors to seek the reversal of wrongful convictions and ruled in February 2023 that there was clear and convincing evidence Johnson was innocent. He walked free after 28 years. At the time, Missouri's compensation law largely excluded non-DNA cases like his. The state expanded the law in 2025 to allow some people cleared through evidentiary hearings and prosecutorial motions to seek restitution.

Sheldon Thomas' case began with an identification mistake that police actually knew about before his trial. In December 2004, 14-year-old Anderson Bercy was killed and another person wounded in a shooting in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. Detectives placed a photograph of a different man named Sheldon Thomas into a photo array. A witness identified that other Thomas, but police went to the defendant's address and arrested him anyway.

The mistake came to light during the legal proceedings, but the prosecution continued. Thomas was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder, attempted murder, and related charges and sentenced to 25 years to life. A Brooklyn District Attorney Conviction Review Unit investigation later found that the case had been compromised from the beginning and that police lacked probable cause to arrest him. His conviction was vacated in March 2023 after more than 18 years in prison. New York City later agreed to a $6.5 million settlement related to the wrongful conviction.

Kenneth Marsh was babysitting his girlfriend's children in San Diego in 1983 when her 2-year-old son, Phillip, suffered a fatal head injury. Marsh said the boy had fallen and struck his head on a brick fireplace hearth. Police initially believed the death was accidental, but medical testimony later characterized the injuries as abuse. Marsh was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life.

Years later, new medical experts concluded that the evidence used at trial did not establish abuse and that the child's medical condition and treatment could have contributed to his death. An independent forensic review commissioned by prosecutors also concluded the evidence could not prove a homicide. Marsh's conviction was set aside in August 2004, and prosecutors dismissed the charge the following month after he had spent nearly 21 years in prison. California later awarded him $756,900 for his wrongful imprisonment.

Kimberly Long returned to her Corona, California, home in October 2003 and found her boyfriend, Oswaldo Conde, beaten to death. Prosecutors argued that Long had killed him shortly after being dropped off at the house, cleaned herself and the scene, changed clothes, disposed of evidence, and staged a robbery. The timeline was extremely tight, but Long was convicted of murder in 2005 and sentenced to 15 years to life.

Her post-conviction attorneys later produced evidence suggesting Conde had died before Long returned home, evidence her trial attorney had failed to present. The California Supreme Court vacated her conviction in 2020, and prosecutors dismissed the murder charge in April 2021 rather than retrying her. In September 2022, the California Victim Compensation Board approved $386,400 for the 2,760 days Long had spent wrongfully imprisoned.

Randolph Arledge was convicted in 1984 of the rape and murder of 21-year-old Carol Elaine Armstrong near Corsicana, Texas. The prosecution relied heavily on two people arrested with Arledge in Tennessee on an unrelated robbery case. They implicated him in Armstrong's killing while negotiating their own legal problems. There was no physical evidence tying Arledge to the murder, and witnesses supported his alibi, but he was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

DNA testing decades later excluded Arledge and produced a database match to another man, David Sims. A judge recommended that Arledge's conviction be vacated in February 2013, and the case was formally dismissed that May. He had lost nearly 29 years to the conviction, not the 14 years sometimes reported in older accounts. Texas awarded him $1.146 million in compensation along with a monthly annuity of $7,140.

Mack Howell was convicted of robbing a 7-Eleven in Eastpointe, Michigan, after investigators found his DNA on a discarded beer can near the store. The problem was that nearly everything else pointed away from him. The masked robber seen on surveillance footage was described as about 6 feet tall. Howell is 5 feet 6 inches tall, used a cane, and had physical limitations that made it difficult for him to run the way the robber did.

The University of Michigan Innocence Clinic later used photogrammetric analysis to show the person captured on video was considerably taller than Howell. A reinvestigation also uncovered evidence of an alternate suspect. The Macomb County Prosecutor's Conviction Integrity Unit joined the request to vacate Howell's conviction, and the case was dismissed on March 20, 2023, after he had served more than seven years of a 25-to-50-year sentence. Michigan later awarded him $321,378 in state compensation. A separate federal lawsuit was dismissed in June 2026.

In March 1931, nine Black teenagers and young men riding a freight train through Alabama were accused of raping two white women after a racially charged fight broke out aboard the train. Within weeks, eight had been convicted by all-white juries and sentenced to death. The youngest, Roy Wright, was 12 years old and received a mistrial when jurors could not agree on whether to execute him.

The prosecutions produced two landmark U.S. Supreme Court rulings. In Powell v. Alabama, the Court found the defendants had been denied adequate legal counsel. In Norris v. Alabama, it ruled that excluding Black citizens from juries violated the Constitution. One accuser, Ruby Bates, also recanted her accusation. The cases dragged on for years, with some charges eventually dismissed and several men serving long prison terms. Clarence Norris received a pardon in 1976, and Alabama granted posthumous pardons to Haywood Patterson, Charles Weems, and Andy Wright in 2013.

William Jackson Marion's case may be the most extreme on this list because the justice system could not give back what it took. Marion and his friend John Cameron traveled through Nebraska in 1873 looking for work. Cameron disappeared, and a decomposed body wearing clothing similar to his was later found with gunshot wounds. Authorities concluded the dead man was Cameron and eventually charged Marion with murder.

Marion was convicted, won a new trial, was convicted again, and was hanged on March 25, 1887. Four years later, Cameron turned up alive in LaCrosse, Kansas. He explained that he had spent years in Mexico and had not known Marion had been prosecuted for his supposed murder. A century after the execution, the Nebraska Board of Pardons granted Marion a full posthumous pardon effective March 25, 1987. It remains one of the starkest examples of a wrongful conviction that could never truly be undone.