(CNN) — After spending 29 years in prison for the rape of his stepdaughter, a New Orleans man is free thanks to the help of the local district attorney’s office and testimony from the victim herself, who has insisted for 20 years that he is not the man who raped her.
Patrick Brown was convicted of raping his 6-year-old stepdaughter in 1994 after pleading not guilty in a trial in which the victim did not testify — instead, adults testified “to what they believed she had said,” according to a release from the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.
Since 2002, the stepdaughter had repeatedly asked the DA’s office to review the case and prosecute the actual perpetrator, the release said.
The office’s civil rights division opened an investigation into the victim’s case, found that the evidence corroborated her account and asked the court to rectify the case, according to the release.
Brown was released from prison Monday, immediately following the decision of the criminal district court, delivered by Judge Calvin Johnson, to vacate his conviction. The victim was present and testified, according to the release and court records.
CNN has reached out to Brown’s attorney, Kelly Orians, for comment.
Williams launched the civil rights division in part to “review cases of wrongful convictions and excessive sentences,” his office’s website reads. The division has intervened in 284 cases since 2021, boasting an estimated $266 million in taxpayer savings on lifetime incarceration, according to the DA’s office.
Orleans Parish has 7.92 more exonerations per capita than the national average — the highest per capita rate among US counties with over 300,000 people, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
A 2022 report from the registry says innocent Black Americans are seven times more likely than White Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes.
An effort to overturn these wrongful convictions across the country has led to the creation of units like the civil rights division in Orleans Parish, dedicated to preventing and remedying false convictions. The National Registry of Exonerations tracked 44 such units across the country with recorded exonerations as of June 2022.
The-CNN-Wire
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