Posted on 08/16/2013 2:38:10 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A man who served 14 years behind bars for a rape he didn’t commit has finally cleared his name — and now he wants someone to pay. Johnny O’Neal, 54, was convicted in 1984 of raping a woman at knifepoint on the rooftop of the Frederick Douglass Houses on the upper West Side.
The Port Jefferson, L.I., man served his sentence and was released in 1998 — but it wasn’t until last month that Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Marcy Kahn dismissed the charges against him.
“It made me so happy. I just cried and cried and cried,” O’Neal said Thursday, publicly describing for the first time the moment he learned he’d been exonerated.
SHis reversal of misfortune was the result of a reinvestigation by the Legal Aid Society, private attorneys and the Manhattan district attorney’s office that uncovered a mountain of evidence pointing to Gregory (PeeWee) Smith, who died 14 years ago.
Investigators discovered in 2007 that Smith had confessed to a mutual friend of O’Neal’s to having committed the rape — as well as two others at knifepoint. Smith used the same type of knife and wore the same kind of jacket the victims described.
O’Neal said he plans to sue “the people responsible” for the years he lost to wrongful incarceration.
New York city, capital of liberalism of the east coast, sure has a lot of these wrongful convictions. They had another guy a few months ago, 19 years for a murder he didn’t do.
Dear God, give this man justice.
Don’t sue. Hunt the bastards who did this down.
24 years lost for nothing. He deserves a million or two.
for every year.
29 years lost! It started in 1984.
If it were me, I’d sue. At the very, very least.
Sickening... Things like this have made me not a big fan of the death penalty.
Yup even though he was released in 1998, he had a felony on his record all those years since and was unlikely able to get a good job along with other things.
Let’s hope he wasn’t guilty of the crime. The article doesn’t provide much in the way of convincing evidence.
I hope the “hang ‘em all after torturing them” brigade reads this story - a disturbing percentage of rape/molestation allegations turn out to be false or end with the wrong person arrested. Something to keep in mind.
I don’t think the police are giving out the details, but it sounds like the real culprit confessed- and more importantly gave details of the crime which verified his involvement.
Agreed. Sometimes I think we were separated at birth.
Texas has a law that compensates for wrongful imprsonment. The amount is set and is multiplied by the number of years.
I don’t think you have to sue: you just apply for it.
Maybe God already did.
And how many of those "wrong" persons were imprisoned for the one rape they didn't commit?
How much would they have to pay you to voluntarily undergo that ordeal? I might for $10 million. Hard to say. I have a family, grandkids, attachments that could never be replaced.
We played bridge with a Japanese couple who had been in internment camps during the War. The husband said that the compensation that Congress passed some time around 1990 worked out to about $21/month with interest. I forewent pointing out that that was precisely the pay my father made as a corporal in the Army under somewhat more arduous conditions.
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