A man from California who unjustly spent six years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit has finally been exonerated after four long decades.
It all started on November 8, 1982, when a young woman was biking in Simi Valley and was attacked by a man. A few months later, while at a pizza shop, she thought she recognized her attacker and noted down his license plate. This led the Simi Valley police to arrest Richard Joseph Luna, then 26, on suspicion of the crime.
Although Luna insisted he was innocent and there was a lack of physical evidence linking him to the assault, a jury still found him guilty of rape by force in 1984. As a result, he was sentenced to six years in prison and permanently registered as a sex offender in California.
Fast forward to recent times, the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office received a significant grant from the Department of Justice aimed at addressing a backlog of untested sexual assault kits. They decided not only to examine these kits but also revisit some cases that resulted in convictions. When they tested the 1982 rape evidence, the DNA didn’t belong to Luna; it matched another man with previous rape convictions.
Once the DA’s office got wind of this miscarriage of justice, they quickly moved to overturn Luna’s wrongful conviction. Just this past Thursday, a judge officially dismissed all charges against him.
“I can hardly comprehend the feeling of being wrongfully convicted… Justice wasn’t served in 1984, but at least today, it seems like justice is finding its way back,” the judge expressed to Luna during the hearing, as reported by Ventura County Star.
According to the judge, Luna will receive restitution for the years spent wrongfully imprisoned. However, the man whose DNA was found in the rape evidence cannot be prosecuted now due to the expiry of the statute of limitations.
