27 years in prison for a crime he did not commit

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  • Charles Chatman (photo Justin Goode) spent 27 years behind bars in Texas after being wrongly convicted of rape in 1981.
  • The 47-year old African-American was exonerated on January 3 2008 and is now an advocate for exonerees.
  • The Dallas County is currently looking at 400 closed cases, where inmates had requested post-conviction DNA testing but did not get any. 16 people have been exonerated in Dallas so far.
Dallas. When Charles Chatman (photo Justin Goode) woke up from his long nightmare, the world had changed. He had never seen a cell phone. He did not know what Internet was. He did not remember how to use a knife to eat. In his cell, the African-American who had been wrongly convicted of rape in 1981 and sentenced to 99 years in prison, watched more than 9800 days slowly go by. For 27 years, the inmate was identified by a number – 324559- rather than by his name. Charles Chatman was freed on January 3 2008 after being exonerated by a DNA test and his name More…
 
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