A man who spent 48 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit has been exonerated by an Oklahoma judge.
Seventy-year-old Glynn Simmons was freed in July after a district court found that crucial evidence in his case was not turned over to his defence lawyers. This week, a county district attorney said there was not enough evidence to warrant a new trial, and Judge Amy Palumbo declared him innocent.
According to the BBC, Simmons served 48 years, one month and 18 days in prison for the 1974 murder of Carolyn Sue Rogers during a liquor store robbery in an Oklahoma City suburb.
Simmons was 22 when he and a co-defendant, Don Roberts, were convicted and sentenced to death in 1975. The punishments were later reduced to life in prison. Roberts was released on parole in 2008.
Simmons had maintained his innocence, saying he was in his home state of Louisiana at the time of the murder.
A district court vacated his sentence in July after finding that prosecutors had not turned over all evidence to defence lawyers, including that a witness had identified other suspects.
Simmons and Roberts were convicted in part because of testimony from a teenager who had been shot in the back of the head. The teenager pointed to several other men during police line-ups and later contradicted some of her own testimony, the National Registry of Exonerations said.
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