In 1997, Nevest Coleman and Darryl Fulton were sentenced to life in prison for the 1994, abduction, rape and murder of a 20-year-old woman in Chicago. But 20 years later, after DNA evidence excluded Coleman and Fulton from crime scene evidence and identified a local man who’d been convicted of several rapes, it was revealed that both men were innocent. The same judge who’d sentenced the men to spend the rest of their lives in prison two decades ago told them last Friday, “You’re free to go.”
The arrest and actions of law enforcement which caused the ball rolling were despicable:
Coleman was taken to the police station where he was both physically assaulted and called a “lying assed n—er” by one of the police officers interrogating him. Ultimately, Coleman maintained his innocence but was coerced into signing a court-reported statement that implicated him as well as Fulton and one of their other friends. Fulton was then arrested and taken to the police station where he too was physically assaulted and threatened to be shot in the head by a police officer. Fulton, too, eventually signed a confession although he insisted that he was not involved in the crime.
