Maurice Hastings Awarded $25M After 38 Years of Wrongful Imprisonment

Maurice Hastings, a 72-year-old Black man who spent nearly four decades behind bars for a crime he did not commit, has been awarded $25 million in what his attorneys describe as the largest wrongful conviction settlement in California history. Hastings was convicted in 1983 for the sexual assault and murder of Roberta Wydermyer and sentenced to life without parole, despite insisting on his innocence. “No amount of money could ever restore the 38 years of my life that were stolen from me,” Hastings said, reflecting on the years he lost. “But this settlement is a welcome end to a very long road, and I look forward to moving on with my life.”

From the beginning, Hastings faced a system stacked against him. His lawsuit accused Inglewood police and a Los Angeles district attorney investigator of deliberately framing him, a tactic long used to criminalize Black communities. Even when Hastings sought DNA testing of evidence in 2000, prosecutors denied his request, effectively burying the truth for decades. It wasn’t until 2021, when the DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit revisited his claim, that testing proved the semen found at the crime scene was not his. In 2022, after 38 years of incarceration, his conviction was vacated.

The DNA evidence pointed instead to Kenneth Packnett, a man already convicted of another violent assault with strikingly similar details to Wydermyer’s killing. Police had even recovered Wydermyer’s belongings when Packnett was arrested shortly after her murder, but they never pursued him as a suspect. By the time the truth emerged, Packnett had already died in prison in 2020. In 2023, a California judge ruled Hastings “factually innocent,” a rare acknowledgment that the state had imprisoned the wrong man.

Hastings now lives in Southern California and is active in his church. For him, freedom came decades too late, but his case stands as a glaring reminder of how the prison system operates—more invested in securing convictions than seeking truth. His attorney, Nick Brustin, put it plainly: “Police departments throughout California and across the country should take notice that there is a steep price to pay for allowing such egregious misconduct on their watch.” For abolitionists, Hastings’ story is not just about one man’s stolen life but about exposing a system built to discard people rather than deliver justice.

Link: CNN