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| Photo Credit: AP. |
A California man who was imprisoned for over 3 decades for a 1983 murder and two attempted murders regained freedom following the release of long-untested DNA evidence suggested another suspect, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney Friday.
69-year-old
Maurice Hastings was convicted in a 1983 case involving Roberta Wydermyer who
was sexually assaulted and then shot dead in the head, according to The
Associated Press. Her lifeless body was later found in the trunk of her vehicle
in Inglewood, a Los Angeles suburb.
Prosecutors
had sought the death penalty for Hastings at the time he was charged with
special-circumstance murder but there was no conviction for him with the first
jury, according to The Associated Press.
A second
jury retried his case and he was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to life in
imprisonment without the possibility of parole. At the time, a sexual assault
examination was conducted during Wydermyer’s autopsy and semen was detected in
an oral swab, The Associated Press cited the district attorney’s statement.
The person whose
DNA matched the new testing died in prison in 2020 after being convicted for
armed kidnapping. He left a lifeless body in car trunk.
On October
20, Hastings life sentence was set aside at the request of prosecutors and his
lawyers from the Los Angeles Innocence Project at California State University,
Los Angeles.
“What has happened to Mr. Hastings is a terrible injustice,” District Attorney George Gascón said in a statement, according to The Associated Press. “The justice system is not perfect, and when we learn of new evidence which causes us to lose confidence in a conviction, it is our obligation to act swiftly.”