Six years ago this week, Ryan Matthews was exonerated after spending five years on Louisiana’s death row for a murder he didn’t commit.

Matthews was 17 years old when he and his friend Travis Hayes were charged with committing a murder in Bridge City, Louisiana. After six hours of interrogation, Hayes falsely confessed to being the getaway driver. A witness to the shooting said he saw the perpetrator in his rearview mirror and identified Matthews in a highly suggestive police procedure. Both men were convicted – Hayes was sentenced to life in prison and Matthews to death.

After years of appeals, attorneys representing Matthews requested DNA comparison on an alternate suspect. The DNA profile from the murder implicated the alternate suspect – proving Matthews and Hayes innocent. Matthews was released in June 2004 and officially cleared in August.  Hayes would not be freed until January of 2007.

After a woman was attacked near a Pittsburgh hospital in 1986, police showed the victim a photographic lineup. None of the photographs were marked except for Doswell’s. His photograph had the letter “R” written on it. At trial, a police officer explained that photographs marked with an “R” represented photographs of people who had been [...]

Larry Johnson spent over 18 years in a Missouri prisons for a rape he did not commit. The victim described a clean-shaven African American male, but identified Johnson at a lineup, even though he had a mustache. He was convicted in 1984 based largely on the cross-racial identification. In more than half of wrongful convictions involving eyewitness misidentification, the eyewitness and defendant were of different races.

Johnson first contacted the Innocence Project in 1995, but it took six more years, and repeated motions, before a Missouri court allowed DNA testing on the remaining biological evidence. The results conclusively excluded Johnson as the perpetrator, and he was officially exonerated eight years ago this week.

After 23 years in Missouri prisons for a rape he didn’t commit, Johnny Briscoe was exonerated four years ago this week when DNA tests proved his innocence.

Briscoe was convicted of raping a suburban St. Louis woman in 1982. The rapist stayed with the victim after the attack, reportedly smoking a cigarette and telling her that his name was Johnny Briscoe. The victim identified Briscoe at a live lineup, where he was the only person wearing an orange jumpsuit.

After his conviction, Briscoe continued to proclaim his innocence. Through the work of Centurion Ministries, investigators eventually discovered the cigarette butts left by the perpetrator. DNA testing on one of the butts revealed the profile of a man Briscoe knew who was already incarcerated. It’s likely that the man was trying to frame Briscoe for the rape. Briscoe, then 52, was vindicated, and he walked out of prison on July 19, 2006.

Steven Toney was wrongfully convicted of a 1982 rape in Missouri after the victim identified him in both photo and in-person lineups.

After his 1983 conviction, Toney filed multiple appeals arguing ineffective assistance of counsel because his trial lawyer had repeatedly refused his requests for DNA testing. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with him in 1996, and later that year biological evidence was tested through the help of Centurion Ministries. The results proved Toney’s innocence and he was exonerated 14 years ago this week after spending over 13 years in prison.

Byron Halsey spent 19 years in prison for the brutal rape and murder of his girlfriend’s two children in 1985. Halsey, who has a sixth-grade education and severe learning disabilities, was interrogated by New Jersey Police for over 30 hours before confessing to the crime. Halsey’s neighbor, Clifton Hall, was initially suspected, since his whereabouts at the time of the murders could not be confirmed, but he was ignored once Halsey confessed. Spectators at Halsey’s trial jeered loudly when he was convicted and “only” sentenced to life in prison, since he was not eligible for the death penalty.

Willie Rainge, along with three other men and one woman, was wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a young couple abducted from a Chicago-area gas station 1978. Among the causes of Rainge’s wrongful conviction was bad lawyering: his attorney failed to point out inconsistencies in the state’s evidence and version of events at trial.

After investigators from the Northwestern School of Journalism took the case in 1996, they discovered lost evidence pointing to the true killers buried in a police file. Subsequent DNA testing excluded all five defendants, and they were officially exonerated 14 years ago this week.

James Curtis Giles was exonerated three years ago this week after serving more than a decade in prison for a Dallas rape he did not commit.

Giles was convicted in 1983 of a crime that authorities would later learn was committed by another man with the same name. He spent 10 years in prison, plus 14 years on parole as a registered sex offender, before he was finally cleared, thanks to DNA testing obtained by the Innocence Project.

Kenneth Wyniemko was convicted of the brutal rape of a Clifton, Michigan woman based on a composite sketch which even the victim said was only 60% accurate. The victim, who repeatedly said she only had a few glimpses of her attacker, described the perpetrator as 6′ to 6′2″ tall, weighing around 200-225 pounds, and 20 to 25 years old. Police informed Wyniemko, who was in police custody on an unrelated misdemeanor charge, that he resembled the sketch despite the fact that he was 5′11″, weighed 198 pounds and was 43 years old.

Thomas McGowan spent nearly 23 years in a Texas prison after a rape victim identified him in a highly suggestive photo lineup. An African American man was burglarizing a home in Richardson, Texas, when the resident, a young woman, returned. The man beat her severely and threatened the woman with a knife before raping her. After she could not identify anyone at a live lineup the day after the crime, investigators showed her a photographic array ten days later. McGowan, whose photo was in the system solely because of a minor traffic violation, stood out from the others because it was the only one marked “Richardon Police Department” — the city where the crime occurred.