The local district attorney’s office helped secure his release with the victim’s testimony, who insisted for 20 years that he was not the man who raped her.
After nearly three decades in prison for the rape of his stepdaughter, Patrick Brown of New Orleans has been released
Brown was convicted in 1994 for raping his 6-year-old stepdaughter, with the trial relying on testimony from adults “to what they believed she had said,” according to a release from the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.
Since 2002, the victim repeatedly contacted the DA’s office to review the case and prosecute the real perpetrator. The office’s civil rights division launched an investigation into the victim’s case, found evidence corroborating her account, and asked the court to rectify the case. Brown was released from prison immediately following the decision of the criminal district court, delivered by Judge Calvin Johnson, to vacate his conviction.
The State is now reviewing charges against the actual perpetrator
Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams said that he launched the civil rights division to “review cases of wrongful convictions and excessive sentences” and that the office has intervened in 284 cases since 2021, with an estimated $266 million in taxpayer savings on lifetime incarceration. The district has 7.92 more exonerations per capita than the national average and is the highest per capita rate among US counties with over 300,000 people, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
The effort to overturn wrongful convictions across the country has led to the creation of units like the civil rights division in Orleans Parish, dedicated to preventing and remedying false convictions. The National Registry of Exonerations has tracked 44 such units across the country with recorded exonerations as of June 2022.
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