Williams was sentenced to life in prison without parole in ’83 for a rape and stabbing he did not commit...
(Baton Rouge, LA – March 21, 2019) Today, Commissioner Kinasiyumki Kimble of the 19thJudicial District Court of East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, vacated the wrongful conviction of Archie Williams, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1983 for a rape and stabbing he did not commit. The commissioner’s ruling was based on new evidence of Williams’ innocence–a search in the FBI’s national fingerprint database which linked fingerprints left at the crime scene to the true assailant, a man who committed at least five other rapes in the years after the 1982 rape for which Williams was wrongly convicted. Williams’ case is one of the Innocence Project’s oldest cases and boldly underscores the urgent need for every state to have laws that ensure wrongfully convicted people who don’t have DNA evidence in their cases can still get back into court based on other critical evidence of innocence, including a statutory right to access fingerprint databases.
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