Two brothers who were wrongfully convicted of a murder were exonerated on Tuesday after spending a quarter of a century in prison.
George and Melvin DeJesus spent 25 years for the July 11, 1995 murder of a woman in Pontiac, Michigan.
The woman had been found in her basement with a pillowcase over her head and wires binding her neck, wrists and ankles. The brothers were wrongly convicted of murder due to testimony given by the actual killer, Brandon Gohagen, according to CNN Detroit affiliate .
‘Walking out, just with the feeling of vindication, it was great,’ George DeJesus said on Tuesday shortly after his release. ‘This is the best day of my life.’
He hadn’t seen his brother in roughly 24 years because they were held in separate correctional facilities.
Despite having alibis, the brothers were convicted in 1997, two years after Margaret Midkiff was found dead in her home. They were sentenced to life without parole.
An investigation conducted by the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) found the men were wrongly imprisoned for the crime Gohagen had committed.
‘Twenty-five years of your life have been taken from you and that cannot be replaced,’ Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Martha D Anderson told the brothers. ‘Hopefully, you will be able to find some solace in the fact that you will be able to rejoin your family and start living a normal life outside the prison walls.’
While Gohagen’s DNA was found at the crime scene, he had told authorities that Melvin DeJesus had forced him to sexually assault the victim and said it was the brothers that bound and beat the victim to death.
Gohagen pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and first-degree criminal sexual conduct in exchange for testifying against the brothers.
Two decades later, in 2017, the killer was convicted of raping and killing another woman in Pontiac a year before Midkiff’s 1995 killing.
Investigators had found 12 other women who had been ’emotionally physically and sexually abused’ by Gohagen.
As CIU’s investigation progressed, evidence that impeached Gohagen’s credibility was uncovered, including a witness who said Gohagen had implicated the brothers in exchange for a plea deal.
The brothers’ exonerations are the third and fourth wrongful convictions overturned with the help of the CIU, the attorney general’s office said. The unit has so far received more than 1,600 requests for assistance.
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