A 70-year-old man walked out of a North Carolina prison on Friday after serving nearly 40 years for a crime he did not commit.
Joseph Sledge was convicted of double murder and rape in 1976, and was exonerated with DNA evidence that sat in Columbus County Clerk of Courts' Vault #1 for decades.
Sledge said he let go of anger and bitterness over his situation long ago.
"When you're conscious of something you didn't do, you can live with yourself," he told reporters minutes after his release. "It's between you and your maker. That's the reality of the matter."
At the time of the murders, Sledge was supposed to be in prison for a larceny conviction but had escaped. He was travelling through Elizabethtown when two residents - Josephine, 74, and Aileen Davis, 53 - were brutally attacked.
Two inmates said that Sledge confessed to the murder of the mother and daughter, and a jury convicted him in 1978. The jurors never learned that fingerprints, bloody footprints, and pubic hair found at the scene of the crime did not match Sledge.
Over two dozen requests were filed by Sledge's attorney and the Innocence Inquiry Commission for the state to reconsider the case and test the DNA evidence.
Finally, a clerk discovered an envelope in Vault #1 that contained the hairs found at the Davis murder. Testing proved Sledge was innocent.
Attorney Chris Mumma had been working on Sledge's case for 10 years, and described the phone call from the clerk's office as "Divine Intervention."
Sledge offered a message regarding the real killer. "I don't know how they'll do it, but they might find the person, and if they don't, well... he's got to answer in Resurrection," he said. "So he can't win any way."
