California Agrees to Pay Millions in Wrongful Conviction Settlement

(MENAFN) The US state of California on Tuesday agreed to award a record $25 million to resolve the state’s largest wrongful conviction case, compensating a man who endured over 38 years behind bars for a 1983 crime he did not commit.

Maurice Hastings, 72, had been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for the 1983 sexual assault and murder of Roberta Wydermyer, who succumbed to a single gunshot wound to the head.

Hastings was finally released in October 2022 after new DNA examinations conclusively identified another individual as responsible for the crime.

The August settlement arose from a lawsuit asserting that two Inglewood city police officers and a Los Angeles District Attorney investigator had falsely implicated Hastings.

The district attorney’s office noted that the coroner had collected the perpetrator’s bodily fluids during a sexual assault assessment at the victim’s autopsy. Hastings had requested DNA testing in 2000 but was denied.

In 2021, he renewed his plea of innocence, and subsequent testing determined that the semen did not belong to him, leading prosecutors and his attorneys to overturn his conviction in 2022, when he was 69.

Kenneth Packnett was apprehended for an unrelated car theft less than three weeks after the 1983 murder.

Authorities discovered jewelry and a coin purse that matched the victim's possessions, but he was not investigated for the murder at that time. Packnett passed away in prison in 2020.

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