“I prayed for many years that this day would come,” Hastings said after his conviction was overturned.

Maurice Hastings, a 69-year-old man who was wrongfully imprisoned for 38 years, was freed on October 20, 2022, after new DNA test results presented by the Los Angeles Innocence Project and California Forensic Science Institute at Cal State LA pointed conclusively to another suspect.

No physical evidence linked Hastings to the 1983 robbery-homicide and sexual assault in Inglewood, California, for which he was arrested and convicted; and numerous alibi witnesses attested to his whereabouts during the crime. Prosecutors sought to impose the death penalty following Hastings’ guilty verdict, but the jury instead sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Biological evidence collected from the victim as part of a sexual assault kit had been preserved but never DNA tested, despite Hastings’ repeated requests dating back decades. “I have been incarcerated for over fifteen years for a murder that I did not commit,” Hastings wrote in a letter to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in 2000. “The most compelling of the evidence that has not as of yet been examined is the DNA evidence which will conclusively show that I was not the person involved with the deceased at the time of the crime.”

That evidence—an oral swab from the victim that contained semen—was tested in June 2022 and excluded Hastings. The testing also produced a new DNA profile that generated a hit when uploaded to the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, to a DNA profile linked to a known sex offender of similar physical description to Hastings, who was not previously considered a suspect, and died in prison in 2020 while serving a sentence for kidnapping and rape.

LAIP is thrilled to welcome Maurice Hastings home.