A Detroit man is finally free after spending 45 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
Detroit News reports that Richard Dan Phillips is a free man after Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy dismissed the charges against him and stated the judicial system failed him.
“There’s nothing that I can say to bring back 40 years of his life. The system failed him. There’s no question about it,” the prosecutor said during a news conference Wednesday. “This is a true exoneration. Justice is indeed being done today, but there’s nothing that we can do … to bring back those years of his life.”
Although he undeservedly spent 45 years behind bars, Phillips said he’s not bitter. He said he still believes in the judicial system and that “it works (though) not fast enough in my case.”
Phillips was sentenced in October 1972 to life in prison, along with co-defendant Richard Palombo of the murder of Gregory Harris. Palombo told the parole board in recent years that he and his brother-in-law killed Harris, and that he didn’t even know Phillips at the time.
According to David Moran, the University of Michigan law professor that took up Phillips’ cause, Phillips has served the longest sentence of anyone to be exonerated in the U.S.