Superior Court Judge William C. Ryan ordered the release of Luis Vargas, who has been in prison for 16 years, reported USA Today.
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At a hearing Monday afternoon, Vargas appeared in a downtown courtroom handcuffed and dressed in blue jail scrubs. His mother & daughter were present in court. He has been taken into federal custody until his green card can be restored.
Luis Vargas, 46, was convicted of raping three women, but always protested his innocence. In the other two cases, Vargas was accused of attacking the victims with the intent of raping them.
The teenager was walking along a footpath from Alvechurch station just before 8pm on June 26, 1987, when she became aware of a noise behind her. He then grabbed her and placed his hands over her eyes, preventing her from identifying him.
“You can sentence me to all the years you want”, he warned a judge in 1999, “but as far as I’m concerned…that individual that really did these crimes might really be raping someone out there”. Officials say the sophisticated technology used in the tests did not exist at the time of Mr Vargas’s original trial.
A wrongfully convicted man was exonerated after serving 16 years behind bars on rape and sexual assault charges. It also added a new wrinkle to a hunt that has long haunted Los Angeles law enforcement.
The known predator known to get a tattoo of the teardrop under his attention it is thought of 35 over the Los Angeles area and continues to be connected by genetics to 11 offenses, the innocence project said.
This year, Los Angeles police detectives posted a plea on Facebook asking the community for help finding the man. In 2012, Vargas reached out to the California Innocence Project and asked to use DNA techniques to examine samples on the clothing of one of his alleged victims, per the Times. Vargas was excluded as a potential contributor.
Prosecutors said the three assaults were so similar, they were “signature crimes” that could only be committed by the same person.
Vargas was cleared after his attorneys requested new DNA testing. Michael Semanchik of the California Innocence Project described the match as “very, very close”.
Det Insp Paul Hardman, who worked with the team to arrest Hearle, said: “Steven Hearl never came forward and consciously allowed his victim to endure over 25 years of suffering in the knowledge that her attacker was still at large, and more worryingly, unidentified”. Vargas has a similar tattoo.
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During the trial, the prosecution relied only on the testimony of the women and did not test the rape kits that had been taken from the women, in spite of testimony from witnesses who said Vargas was working at a bagel shop where he was employed when the attempted rapes and rape occurred.
