Two men wrongfully-imprisoned for more than two decades were able to spend Christmas with their families after a podcast and non-profit advanced evidence of their innocence.
Darrell Lee Clark and Cain Joshua Storey were just teenagers when they stood trial for a murder of their 15-year-old friend he died of gunshot wounds at a party in 1996.
Clack had all the charges against him dropped after a motion for a new trial was field on his behalf by attorneys from the Georgia Innocence Project. He was released Thursday along with Storey.
“You never think something like that is going to happen to you,” Clark said in the statement.
“Never would I have thought I would spend more than half my life in prison, especially for something I didn’t do. I’m just glad the truth finally came to light after 25 years. I’m so thankful for the Georgia Innocence Project and Proof Podcast for what they did. Without them, I would still be in prison.”
Susan Simpson and Jacinda Davis host a podcast called “Proof” and they began interviewing the state’s two key witnesses about the case last year.
The details go like this. At a party, 15-year-old Brian Bowling shot himself in a game of Russian Roulette with a gun allegedly provided by Storey. Manslaughter was to be the original charge, but Bowling’s distraught family urged for the charge to be stiffened to murder, and charged Clark who had a corroborating alibi of his absence from the whole situation, in a conspiracy to murder.
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The Proof podcast hosts interviewed the party hostess, who admitted that the police had coerced her into making false statements regarding Clark and Storey’s testimony. The second witness was a hearing-impaired man, and Simpson and Davis got him on record as not being able to separate the Bowling murder details with a very similar case from ten years later in 1976.
Furthermore, according to this hearing impaired witness, he never saw Clark run through Bowling’s yard, which was the original cornerstone of his charging in the case.
“An autopsy in the case would have solved it, yet they refused to get an autopsy,” said Mr. Storey’s attorney Luke Martin. “That autopsy would have shown this was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
The Georgia Innocence Project also reported, according to NBC, that a coroner, who was untrained as a doctor, testified that it was his “gut feeling” that the gunshot was not self-inflicted.
A Redditor following the case commented on a thread about Clark and Storey’s release that this coroner later went to federal prison for wide-scale fraud he committed while working as a coroner, including for sending bills to families for autopsies.
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“We are elated, thrilled that he is finally home after all this time. It’s even better that it’s in time for the holidays,” Clark’s attorney Meagan Hurley said. “Twenty-five years is an incredibly long time to spend incarcerated for a crime you didn’t commit.”
Hurley credits the Bowlings, who agreed to hear what the podcasters and attorneys had to say.
CELEBRATE The Release Of These Innocent Men On Facebook…
The U.S. officially considers that the greatest crime that can be committed is putting an innocent person to death or behind bars. There are a lot of charitable things I’d be driven to do if I won one of these giant lotteries. At the top of the list would be to donate millions to groups such as the Georgia Innocence Project. As I write this, it is 1/2/2022, and there is nothing that this season has given me more joy than this story of these two citizens living free again.
lol….I meant 2023