A Chicago man who spent 25 years in jail for a rape he didn't commit was fully exonerated Monday on the basis of new DNA evidence, bringing to 200 the number of such cases overturned since the 1980s.
A judge vacated Jerry Miller's conviction on all charges stemming from the 1981 rape after his lawyers and state prosecutors presented genetic evidence that ruled him out as the attacker.
Miller, 48, was paroled from jail in March 2006 after serving more than half of his 45 year sentence.
In her ruling at a brief hearing in Cook County Criminal Court, Judge Diane Cannon also ordered that Miller be released from parole, and that his name be removed from the state's sex offenders registry.
Miller beamed as he thanked God and his lawyers at a press conference after the proceedings.
"I want to get on with my life. Start a life. Have a life," he said.
Miller expressed no anger, made no recriminations and said he had moved past bitterness.
"Bitterness profits no one. It definitely doesn't profit me. It's not part of my character. Sure I went through it - I'm human. But I overcame that," he said.
Miller was 23 and fresh from a stint in the military when he was fingered as the assailant in a brazen attack on a 44-year-old woman in a downtown Chicago garage late one night in September 1981.
The attacker beat, robbed and raped the woman before forcing her into the trunk of her car.
With the victim still in the trunk, the assailant tried to drive the vehicle out of the garage, but was forced to flee on foot when confronted by two parking attendants.
DNA testing was not available when Miller was convicted of the attack in 1982 and sentenced to 45 years in jail for rape, robbery, and aggravated kidnapping.
His conviction turned largely on what proved to be flawed eyewitness testimony, which is at fault in many wrongful conviction cases according to the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal clinic that helped to clear his name.
Lawyers for the Innocence Project said Miller's case highlighted the difficulties facing black defendants, particularly in cases where a black man is accused of sexually assaulting a white woman.
They noted that of the 200 people exonerated by DNA evidence, 62 percent of them were black men, which is "disproportionate" given the high proportion of black males among the US prison population.
"The factor of racism and racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is something we can never lose sight of," said Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which specializes in investigating cases involving alleged miscarriages of justice where there is DNA evidence.
The latest evidence didn't just clear Jerry Miller, it also implicated the real assailant, a man called Robert Weeks, according to attorneys for the Cook County State's Attorney's Office.
Police identified him by running the DNA from the 1981 rape through an FBI database. Weeks however cannot be charged with the 1981 rape because the statute of limitations on the crime has expired.
Weeks went on to assault another woman in April 1982, about seven months after the attack that landed Miller in jail.
