From [HERE] and [HERE] The felony assault conviction of a Black man was reversed on Friday after a special investigation by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office revealed he was the victim of mistaken eyewitness testimony and innocent of the crime for which he had already served two years in prison. "I feel like somebody else," said Lawrence Williams, 36, who two years ago was slapped with a 10-year sentence for assault and has fought for exoneration ever since. "It's like an out of body experience for me to be free."

Williams was locked up at Rikers for three months as he awaited trial for the 2008 stickup over a gold chain. He then spent 26 months in an upstate prison. Private investigators managed to locate the real gunman, whose DNA matched a tee-shirt found at the scene.

The man, Taevon Hutchinson, confessed to the crime to private investigators in February 2012, then confirmed the confession to a police detective over the phone. But his current whereabouts are unknown. It's unclear whether he’ll be prosecuted for the shooting, sources said. Complicating matters, despite the exoneration, court papers say the victim "remains adamant" that he correctly fingered Williams.

Williams always claimed he was at his Staten Island home with his wife when the shooting took place inside a Coney Island tenement. Nobody seems to know how Williams became a suspect.