Crime

52 Years After Being Wrongfully Convicted, Man Finally Gets Exonerated And Has One Thing On His Mind

After 52 years this man's name is cleared.

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Paul Gatling (photo by NBC News/screen capture)

Paul Gatling (photo by NBC News/screen capture)

I want my name cleared. Most of all, I just want to vote before I die. That’s a big deal for me. I couldn’t vote for the first black president.

–Paul Gatling, convicted of a 1963 murder he did not commit, was finally exonerated yesterday by Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson and will be able to exercise his right to vote in the election this November. Gatling’s sentence was commuted and he was released from prison in 1974 with the help of Legal Aid attorney Malvina Nathanson, but he still had the conviction looming over his life. One of the assistant district attorneys assigned to the Conviction Review Unit, Eric Sonnenschein, received Gatling’s file and began to investigate, saying it was “[d]efinitely more challenging to investigate because it’s so old. But there’s no statute of limitations on correcting a miscarriage of justice.” The Brooklyn DA’s Conviction Review Unit has overturned 20 convictions thus far.

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