An Oklahoma man has been exonerated of a murder he did not commit after serving almost 50 years in prison.
He made history, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, by having the longest-served wrongful sentence in the United States.
On Tuesday, Dec. 19, Judge Amy Palumbo of Oklahoma County District Court declared Glynn Simmons innocent of the crime.
“This is a day we’ve been waiting on for a long, long time. It finally came,” Simmons said, according to KFOR, adding, “We can say justice was done today, finally, and I’m happy.”
Simmons was initially sentenced to the death penalty and incarcerated in 1975 at the age of 22 after being convicted of first-degree murder in connection with a liquor store robbery in Edmond, Oklahoma, on Dec. 30, 1974. The 22-year-old Black man had been more than 700 miles from Edmond that day.
The now-71-year-old Simmons was convicted of killing white store clerk Carolyn Sue Rogers during the robbery. Another woman was shot in the head during the robbery but survived, and she was their primary witness after the crime.
Three days after the slaying, the eyewitness, then-18-year-old Belinda Brown, told police from her hospital bed that the liquor store holdup was perpetrated by two Black men, and she helped their composite sketch artist with a description of the pair.
But after the leads in the case went cold, Edmond Police returned to Brown in February 1975 with a series of lineups consisting of Black men who had been arrested at a party nearby Oklahoma City.
The white woman participated in eight separate lineups and identified at least five men as potentially being involved in the shooting.
Somehow, Simmons and another man named Don Roberts were named as the suspects.
“I never was picked out of a lineup,” Simmons said in an interview with News 4. “I’m still trying to figure out how did I get identified as the suspect? How did the police make me the suspect when the…
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