DNA exonerates man convicted in 1975 Greenburgh rape

The conviction of a man found guilty of the gunpoint rape of a teenager in Greenburgh nearly half a century ago was thrown out Tuesday after DNA testing determined he had not committed the crime and identified the actual rapist.

“For 48 years, 48 long years, I walked around society being labeled a rapist when I knew I didn’t do it,” Leonard Mack, who turned 72 Tuesday, told state Supreme Court Justice Anne Minihan. “Now that this day is here I just thank God. I thank God that finally the truth came out. Now I can truly say that I’m free. Not when I got out of Sing Sing but when I walk out of here today.”

Westchester District Attorney Mimi Rocah apologized to Mack for the “incalculable damage and the collateral consequences” that the failures of prosecutors and the criminal justice system wrought on him as she joined his lawyers from The Innocence Project in asking Minihan to vacate the 1976 conviction, for which Mack spent nearly seven years in state prison.

Minihan said it was the honor of her career to do so, even coming off the bench to shake his hand and give him a hug.

“This is your day. You’ve waited much too long for it,” she told him, calling it "the rainbow at the end of a terrible storm". “In what we do the stakes are very high and it’s important to get it right.”

The Innocence Project says it was aware of no other wrongful conviction that took as long as Mack's to be reversed by new DNA testing.

Mack, who has lived in South Carolina for more than 30 years, said Monday that erasing the conviction would let him lead a life he was always meant to, free of the stigma that dogged him for decades.

"I never gave up hope; I never threw in the towel," he told The Journal News/lohud in a phone interview before Tuesday's proceedings. "I know it's here but I just can't believe it's actually happened.”

The rape occurred May 22, 1975. Two teenage girls were walking home from Woodlands High School through a wooded area of the Metropolis golf club. They passed a man walking toward them when he doubled back and demanded they not turn around and threatened to kill them if they did. He held them at gunpoint, used their clothes to gag them and bind their ankles and wrists and raped one of them twice before fleeing.

The girl who was raped ran home, where her sister called police and she was taken to a hospital. The other girl ran to another school where a staff member also called police.

Based on their description of a Black man, wearing a brimmed hat and an earring, Mack was pulled over more than two hours later five miles away on Harney Road in Eastchester by a Westchester County Parkway police officer. A search of his car revealed a gun in the trunk. The unharmed girl was driven there and asked whether Mack was the assailant. He was the only one there in handcuffs, surrounded by police officers. She said he was.

What followed were more highly suggestive identification procedures, including one in which she told detectives that Mack's clothes did not match those of the rapist. They provided him different clothes and she then said he was the one who attacked them.

The victim had not clearly seen her attacker but did claim to have recognized his voice when police told him to speak the assailant's threat as she watched behind a one-way mirror at headquarters.

Mack was 23 at the time, a Vietnam War veteran with a 2-year-old daughter and an infant son and was pursuing a GED at Rochambeau School in White Plains. Police ignored his protestations that he had been with his girlfriend that afternoon and with mechanics discussing car repairs and had nothing to do with the rape.

"(The hardest thing) was being charged, knowing I wasn't that kind of individual, that I'm not that kind of man that would do something like that," he said Monday. "I wanted to know why would you do that to a Vietnam veteran, a person who fought for his country and now this is what you do to me. I came home and you falsely accuse me and you throw me in prison?"

Several of the identifications were ruled inadmissible at trial the following year, but the roadside one and the friend's in-court ID were allowed and became the focus of the prosecution's case - with jurors never learning about the improper identifications.

Mack presented an alibi defense, with three witnesses including the girlfriend detailing where he had been around the time of the rape. More significantly he had a serologist from the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner testify that Mack was not the source of the biological evidence on the victim's underwear because he had a different blood type.

DNA was not relied upon yet in criminal proceedings. The prosecution called a rebuttal witness from the county forensics lab who mistakenly opined that the victim might have been the source of the biological evidence.

Jurors relied on that and the identifications to convict Mack of first-degree rape and weapon possession and he was sentenced in April 1976 to 7 1/2 to 15 years in prison.

Susan Friedman, one of Mack's lawyers at The Innocence Project, called the case a "powerful example of how tunnel vision and racial bias can lead to a wrongful conviction."

"Despite the fact that Mr. Mack didn't match the description and the fact that his clothing didn't match and the IDs were unreliable and the serology was exculpatory, the State didn't do much else to investigate the case beyond that," she said.

She said that an extensive review of cases involving serological evidence is needed to determine if Mack’s conviction was an isolated occurrence or part of a pattern of mistakes.

But what was already certain, she said, was the impact of eyewitness misidentification, the leading contributor to wrongful convictions, with 64 percent of The Innocence Project’s 245 exonerations and releases having that factor.

Rocah said the system failed not just Mack but also the victims and the community at large, considering that the focus on him allowed the real perpetrator to continue his criminal activity.

Including the 10 months he spent at the county jail awaiting trial, Mack was incarcerated for seven and a half years. He remained on parole until the mid 1980s, working mostly as a groundskeeper and caddie at Wykagyl Country Club before leaving for South Carolina, where he had lived the first 10 years of his life and still had family.

Mack, who said his faith has been strengthened by his ordeal, remains hopeful that he can pursue work in prison ministry, an avenue he was long rejected for because of the nature of his conviction.

He cited some of the hardships that followed his conviction.

When his son was still young his mother brought him to prison for a visit and the boy broke into tears at the end because he had thought Mack was going home with them.

When a sister died, Mack was brought shackled from Auburn prison to attend the funeral, three guards with .357s telling him they’d shoot him if he tried anything.

And while he worked in trucking and supply jobs over the years, if he acknowledged his conviction he’d usually be denied employment and if he didn’t he’d lose the job once it became known.

Years of trying to get a court to take a new look at his case went nowhere. Finally in 2020, Mack sought the assistance of The Innocence Project. After their review, in 2022 they asked the Westchester DA's Conviction Review Unit to assist. The rape kit was no longer available but cuttings from the victim's underwear were. New DNA testing allowed technicians at the county forensics lab this summer to rule out Mack as the source of the stains.

When a sample was submitted to a DNA database, a match resulted to a man convicted for a Queens rape two weeks after the one in Greenburgh and for a 2004 knifepoint sodomy of a woman whose home he had broken into in the Orchard Hill neighborhood of Greenburgh.

The District Attorney’s Office said that man has confessed to the 1975 Greenburgh rape but cannot be prosecuted for it because the statute of limitations in place at the time has expired.

But he has been charged with failing to register or verify as a sex offender in connection to the 2004 crime.

Although her office is prosecuting him, Rocah refused to identify the man, citing the lack of a conviction in the earlier rape. But a review of inmate records of the county jail show that it is Robert Goods, now 73. Between 1975 and 2013 he served 28 years in prison for the two sex-crime convictions and a pair of other convictions for burglary and drug possession.

He is a Level 3 sex offender, the most restrictive level, who was also prosecuted and pleaded guilty for failing to register when he did not report to Greenburgh police that he had moved in 2016 and that he did not provide an updated photograph as required the following year. Sex offender registry records show his most recent address is in Pelham, where the latest charge has been filed. Specific details of how he has most recently failed to register were not immediately available.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: 1976 rape conviction thrown out after DNA testing clears Leonard Mack