Our thanks to Martin for this. Extracts (emphases ours):
A man has been awarded almost $2m (£1.4m) after being wrongly imprisoned for murder for almost 40 years.
Craig Richard Coley, 70, was awarded the cash on Thursday (15 February) by the California Victims Compensation Board, which allotted $140 for each of the 13,991 days he spent in prison…
He was jailed for the murders of 24-year-old Rhonda Wicht and her four-year-old son, Donald, who were found dead in her southern Californian apartment on 11 November 1978.
But Coley, who had always maintained his innocence, was pardoned last year, the day before Thanksgiving Day, by Californian Governor Jerry Brown, after advanced DNA evidence cleared his name.
Coley was arrested after Wicht had been found beaten, raped, and strangled. Her son, Donald, had been smothered in his bed. The former military man had recently ended a relationship with Wicht, and detectives made him their prime suspect.
Coley’s first trial in 1979 resulted in a hung jury, but at his second a year later, he was found guilty of the double murder and sentenced to life without parole.
After a series of failed appeals Coley’s supporters turned to a private lab, which used techniques not available at the time of the trial to examine Rhonda’s bed sheet. Tests did not find DNA from Coley, but did find DNA from another unknown man.
Investigators were also able to disprove testimony from an eyewitness who placed Coley at the scene.
How many innocent men must be languishing in prison – or facing execution, in prisons in the United States and elsewhere – because they don’t have supporters with the money to fund DNA tests, private investigators etc.?
Justice for Men & Boys 
This is a major reason I remain against the death sentence.
Human justice is just too fallible to entertain it.
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There is a petition to get an independent review of the disclosure fiascos.
https://www.change.org/p/11675671/u/22402728?utm_medium=email&utm_source=petition_update&utm_campaign=258120&sfmc_tk=RK8eShYKgD9yqXKc2Uk4w1XNzxHQrBLDrghGz9Xlm12aZRq1%2fwQE4k7ECiBwdl44&j=258120&sfmc_sub=184523585&l=32_HTML&u=46893130&mid=7259882&jb=3
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And yet another example of evidence “left out” by a Police and Prosecution not interested in investigation but hitting targets for convictions. No one is safe. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-43048086
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If you think the UK system is bad (and it is) the US is a whole other world! The US has the largest prison population on the planet, there are 4-5 times more people incarcerated in America PER CAPITA than the UK and the UK is not a particularly low incarcerator.
The US generally have very long sentences for absurdly minor and random crimes. For example, just yesterday I read of how Sony are handing data over to the FBI at their request. One guy was suspected of ‘terrorism’ but they couldn’t prove it, so they jailed him for FOUR YEARS on a “passport fraud” charge wtf: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/02/14/sony-playstation-4-data-disclosed-to-feds-in-terrorism-probe/#38e710185c7f
And then of course there’s the US witch hunt laws like drugs and sexual offences. Charges which can easily carry decades in prison and often life imprisonment.
In the US 1 in 3 Black Men WILL go to prison in their lifetime. 1 in 17 White Men WILL go to prison in their lifetime.
This is a moving tale of a 19 year old boy who killed himself after being sent to prison for FOUR YEARS (+ LIFE on the register) for what all normal 19 year old boys do, make out with girls:
https://tftr.narsol.org/2013/05/09/my-grandsons-tragic-suicide/
EDIT: It’s also worth checking out the other stories on the https://tftr.narsol.org site as it lists a lot of horrible cases of men & boys lives that have been destroyed by the US Sex Offender Registry
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