A Detroit man who spent 15 years in prison after pleading no contest to kidnapping and sex crimes in 2007 was exonerated Wednesday by a Wayne County Circuit Court judge.
The Detroit Newsreports Terance Calhoun, 35, was wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting one teenager and attempting to kidnap another teen in Detroit in 2006. Calhoun was convicted in 2007 of rape and kidnapping, and has since spent 15 years in prison.
Calhoun is now a free man after a rediscovered rape kit revealed that DNA evidence helped prove he did not commit the 2006 sexual assault crimes. Although a 2007 DNA test revealed that Calhoun was not found, his attorney David Williams told reporters he wasn’t sure why his client wasn’t exonerated then. Calhoun’s DNA was tested again in 2019, which showed the same result and ultimately spearheaded his journey toward exoneration.
“A series of unfortunate events and a lot of very hard work by quite a few people led to my decision to exonerate Mr. Calhoun,” Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement, per the Detroit Free Press. “The decision, in this case, was the culmination of years of long work on this and unrelated cases. We will leave no stone unturned to get justice for defendants like Mr. Calhoun.”
Valerie Newman, director of the Conviction Integrity Unit, reiterated Worthy’s comments during Wednesday’s hearing, attributing Calhoun’s wrongful conviction to a “myriad of things.”
“Today is about the myriad of things that went wrong, that caused the wrongful conviction of an innocent person,” Newman said. “There are so many things that happened in this case that are troubling, and while this is ostensibly a DNA exclusion case, there is a lot more going on here that supports Mr. Calhoun’s innocence than just the exclusion from the condom.”
