A horrendous miscarriage of justice finally gets a happy ending: Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe has pardoned a man facing life imprisonment for a crime even his prosecutors knew he didn’t commit.
“It’s a great day. It’s a wonderful day,” he told reporters.
Michael McAlister was convicted in 1986 for attempted rape and abduction. But after his trial and conviction, it became apparent that the prosecution’s case didn’t add up–so apparent that the prosecutors themselves eventually admitted they no longer believed him guilty.
As it turns out, McAlister looks very similar to since-convicted serial rapist Bruce Derr, whose methods perfectly matched the crime for which McAlister was jailed. He had attacked women in the same area at the same time–even in the same building where McAlister’s supposed victim was set upon.
And while the victim pointed to McAlister in a police lineup, she had never quite gotten a clear look at her attacker. She did remember he was wearing a plaid shirt. In the police lineup, McAlister happened to be the only person wearing a plaid shirt.
McAlister’s lawyers requested an absolute pardon from McAuliffe, noting that “it is highly improbable that another stocking-mask-wearing, knife-wielding, 6-foot-tall white man with shoulder-length blond hair was terrorizing women at night in the Town & Country apartment complex laundry rooms during that same period in time.”
Now, according to McAuliffe’s statement, Derr has since confessed he was the one responsible for the attack.
From McAuliffe’s office:
Mr. McAlister has served 29 years in prison, and he had faced the potential to be civilly committed for a crime he did not commit. A number of individuals in the law enforcement community, including the Commonwealth’s Attorney for the city of Richmond, have concluded that this crime was committed by another individual, and that Mr. McAlister should be freed to return to his family and his community. I have reached the same conclusion, and I have acted in accordance with the law.
McAlister’s case had been especially complicated by the absurdities of the legal system. Although his sentence ended in January, a Virginia statute concerning “sexually violent predators” required him to face yet another hearing–at which he was legally barred from disputing his original conviction, and which likely would have ended in more confinement.
His mother and sister picked him up from prison. “I am one of the happiest women in the whole wide world right now, next to my mother,” his sister told the Washington Post. “We’re going directly home, so he can eat some of his mother’s home-baked cookies.”
He also plans to celebrate by attending a concert this weekend, and doing some fishing in the near future.
He is likely to seek compensation for his wrongful imprisonment.
Read more on the case here.
