Content warning: Please be advised that this story contains a description of sexual assault.
A man convicted of raping a teenage girl at gunpoint in Greenburgh, New York nearly 50 years ago has been exonerated.
DNA testing confirmed 72-year old Leonard Mack had not committed the assault and identified the actual assailant.
“For 48 years, 48 long years, I walked around society being labeled a rapist when I knew I didn’t do it. Now that this day is here I just thank God. I thank God that finally the truth came out. Now I can truly say that I’m free. Not when I got out of Sing Sing but when I walk out of here today,” Mack said.
Westchester District Attorney Mimi Rocah apologized to Mack for the “incalculable damage and the collateral consequences” that the failures of prosecutors and the criminal justice system wrought on him.
Rocah joined Mack’s lawyers from The Innocence Project to ask state Supreme Court Justice Anne Minihan to vacate the 1976 conviction, for which Mack spent nearly seven years in state prison.
Minihan said it was the honor of her career to do so, even coming off the bench to shake his hand and give him a hug.
“This is your day. You’ve waited much too long for it. In what we do the stakes are very high and it’s important to get it right,” Minihan said.
No other wrongful conviction took as long as Mack’s to be reversed by new DNA testing, according to The Innocence Project.
Mack, a long-time South Carolina resident, said Monday erasing the conviction would let him lead a life he was always meant to enjoy, free of the stigma that dogged him for decades.
"I never gave up hope; I never threw in the towel. I know it's here, but I just can't believe it's actually happened,” Mack shared with The Journal News/lohud before Tuesday's proceedings.
In the summer of 1975, Mack was a 23-year-old Vietnam War veteran with a 2-year-old daughter and an infant son. He was pursuing a GED at Rochambeau School in White Plains.
One night in May of 1975, two teenage girls were walking home from Woodlands High School through a wooded area of the Metropolis golf club, about 25 miles northeast of Manhattan.
They passed a man walking toward them when he doubled back and demanded they not turn around and threatened to kill them if they did. He held them at gunpoint, used their clothes to gag them and bind their ankles and wrists and raped one of them twice before fleeing.
The girl who was raped ran home, where her sister called police and she was taken to a hospital. The other girl ran to another school where a staff member also called the police.
The description the girls gave the police at the time was of a Black man wearing a brimmed hat and an earring. Mack was pulled over by a Westchester County Parkway police officer more than two hours later, about 5 miles from the scene.
Police found a gun in the trunk of his car after police searched his vehicle. The girl’s friend was taken to Mack’s location and asked her whether Mack was the assailant.
He was the only one there in handcuffs, surrounded by police officers. She said he was.
What followed were more highly suggestive identification procedures, including one in which she told detectives that Mack's clothes did not match those of the rapist. Officers provided Mack different clothes and she then said he was the one who attacked them.
The victim had not clearly seen her attacker but did claim to have recognized his voice when police told him to speak the assailant's threat as she watched behind a one-way mirror at headquarters.
Police ignored his protestations that he had been with his girlfriend that afternoon and with mechanics discussing car repairs and had nothing to do with the rape.
"(The hardest thing) was being charged, knowing I wasn't that kind of individual, that I'm not that kind of man that would do something like that. I wanted to know why would you do that to a Vietnam veteran, a person who fought for his country and now this is what you do to me. I came home and you falsely accuse me and you throw me in prison?,” Mack said.
Most of the identifications were ruled inadmissible at trial the following year, but the roadside one and the friend's in-court identification became the focus of the prosecution's case. Jurors were never made aware of the the improper identifications.
Mack presented an alibi defense at trial with three witnesses including his girlfriend at the time detailing where he had been around the time of the rape.
Mack also had a serologist from the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner testify that Mack was not the source of the biological evidence on the victim's underwear because he had a different blood type.
Criminal proceedings did not yet rely on DNA evidence. A rebuttal witness from the county forensics lab was called by the prosecution, who incorrectly suggested that the victim might have been the source of the biological evidence.
Jurors relied on that testimony and identifications made by the victims to convict Mack of first-degree rape and weapon possession. He was sentenced between 7 1/2 to 15 years in prison in April of 1976.
Mack’s case can be considered “powerful example of how tunnel vision and racial bias can lead to a wrongful conviction,” one of Mack’s Innocence Project lawyers Susan Friedman said.
"Despite the fact that Mr. Mack didn't match the description and the fact that his clothing didn't match and the IDs were unreliable and the serology was exculpatory, the State didn't do much else to investigate the case beyond that," she said.
An extensive review of cases involving serological evidence is needed to determine if Mack’s conviction was an isolated occurrence or part of a pattern of mistakes, Friedman said.
The impact of eyewitness misidentification is the leading contributor to wrongful convictions, with 64% of The Innocence Project’s 245 exonerations and releases having that factor. The justice system not only failed Mack nearly five decades ago, but also the victims and the community at large since focus on him allowed the real perpetrator to continue his criminal activity.
Including the 10 months he spent at the county jail awaiting trial, Mack was incarcerated for seven and a half years.
He remained on parole until the mid 1980s, working mostly as a groundskeeper and caddie at Wykagyl Country Club before leaving for South Carolina, where he had lived the first 10 years of his life and still had family.
Years of trying to get a court to take a new look at his case went nowhere. Finally in 2020, Mack sought the assistance of The Innocence Project. The Innocence asked the Westchester DA's Conviction Review Unit to assist in 2022 after their own internal review of the case. Because the rape kit was no longer available, cuttings from the victim's underwear were utilized instead.
New DNA testing allowed technicians at the county forensics lab to rule out Mack as the source of the stains this summer. When a sample was submitted to a DNA database, a match resulted for a man convicted for a Queens rape two weeks after the one in Greenburgh and for a 2004 sex crime in Greenburgh.
The District Attorney’s Office said that man has confessed to the 1975 Greenburgh rape but cannot be prosecuted for it because the statute of limitations in place at the time has expired. He has been instead charged with failing to register as a sex offender in connection to the 2004 crime.
Mack’s conviction brought him a lot of hardship over the years.
When Mack's son was still young, his mother brought him to prison for a visit and the boy broke into tears at the end because he had thought Mack was going home with them.
When a sister died, Mack was brought shackled from Auburn prison to attend the funeral, three guards with .357s telling him they’d shoot him if he tried anything. And while he worked in trucking and supply jobs over the years, if he acknowledged his conviction, he’d usually be denied employment and if he didn’t, he’d lose the job once it became known.
After experiencing this faith-strengthening ordeal, Mack said he remains hopeful that he can pursue work in prison ministry, an avenue he was long rejected for because of the nature of his conviction.
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