After spending a full 25-year sentence in prison for a crime he did not commit, a Bronx, New York, man has been exonerated by the New York State Supreme Court due to DNA evidence. Rafael Ruiz was convicted in 1985 for sexually assaulting a girl in East Harlem. At the initial trial, Ruiz was sentenced to 8 ⅓ to 25 years in prison, despite the fact that he did not match the description of the attacker, who the victim said was an acquaintance of hers. She knew this man as “Ronnie,” a name Ruiz has never been called.
Now, at the age of 60, Ruiz had his felony conviction wiped off his criminal record after newly tested DNA from the victim’s sex assault kit found by the Innocence Project and the Manhattan District Attorney Office’s Conviction Integrity Program excluded him from the case.
“I was a man who went to court and went to trial to prove his innocence, but I was treated like I was already guilty when I stepped in there,” Ruiz said.
His case highlights what is often called the “trial penalty” — when defendants receive much longer sentences for the same crime after taking their case to trial than they would have if they had pled guilty and taken a deal. This is one of the reasons why 18% of known exonerees pled guilty to crimes they didn’t commit.
Since 1958, over 2,548 wrongful convictions have been overturned in the United States, according to The National Registry of Exonerations. Of the thousands of exoneration cases, 735 were overturned because of mistaken witness identification, according to data from the NRE.
“I am thankful to the Innocence Project for all their work to make today a reality,” said Ruiz. “I lost 25 years of my life because I insisted upon my innocence and rejected plea bargains. Today feels like a huge burden off my shoulders and I look forward to living a good life moving forward.”
