Two men - Clifford Williams, 76, and his nephew Nathan Myers, 61 - have been exonerated after spending 43 years in a Florida prison for a crime they didn't commit.

The pair were vindicated on Thursday when a judge was asked by prosecutors to vacate their convictions as it was no longer believed that they were guilty of murder.

This is the touching moment Nathan Myers kisses the ground after being freed from prison:

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Williams and Myers were wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in prison for fatally shooting Jeanette Williams and attempting to murder her girlfriend, Nina Marshall in 1976.

The women, who were acquainted with the defendants, were both asleep in their bed when the shooting occurred.

While Williams died instantly, her girlfriend was able to find a ride to a hospital. She later identified Williams and Myers as the shooters.

Despite the fact that alibis confirmed that the uncle and his nephew were at a birthday party at the time of the shooting, they were ultimately handed a life sentence.

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The verdict was supported by very little evidence. In fact, there wasn't any physical evidence at all that connected the shootings to Williams and Meyers. The outcome of the trial relied only on Marshall's testimony in which she argued that the pair had fired shots from the foot of her bed.

"In fact, the physical and scientific evidence actually contradicts her testimony about what happened," a report from the state attorney states.

Bullet holes in a curtain and broken glass indicated that the shots had come from outside the bedroom window, as opposed to from the foot of Marshall's bed.

Marshall passed away in 2001 and so when the case was re-examined, investigators were unable to question her.

"I lost almost 43 years of my life that I can never get back," Myers said in the report. "But I am looking ahead and will focus on enjoying my freedom with my family."

Dramatic footage has been released of a man who spent 17 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit crying and clutching the hands of the judge who exonerated him.

John Bunn, a 41-year-old man from Brooklyn, New York, was just 14-years-old when he was arrested and convicted for second-degree murder. Bunn has always maintained his innocence in relation to the crime, which saw the murder of an off-duty correction officer, Rolando Neischer, and the attempted murder of his partner, Robert Crosson in 1991.

Bunn and Rosean Hargrave - another local teenager - were accused of dragging the officers out of their car before shooting them and stealing the vehicle. Crosson survived the incident and became the only witness to the case.

Having spent years in prison trying to clear his name, working with attorneys from the Exoneration Initiative, Bunn was granted parole in 2009. Seven years later, in 2016, his murder conviction was tossed out, and just this week he was officially exonerated of the charge.

Bunn's claims of innocence were only listened to after it was revealed that Louis Scarcella - the lead detective on the case - used "false and misleading practices" during his time in the New York Police Department. Scarcella was accused of manipulating witnesses, giving misleading testimony and coercing confessions.

Bunn's legal team have suggested that there were issues with the case from the very beginning, citing the fact that Crosson once described the suspects as being "light-skinned men in their 20s". Not only this, but fingerprints that were found at the crime scene did not belong to the teenagers.

The New York Daily News reports the Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Shawn'Dya Simpson told Bunn:

"I am more than emotional about this day. You were 14 at the time. This shouldn’t have ever happened.

"Move forward. Keep me posted."

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CNN reports Bunn as saying in court;

"They won't admit and say that I'm an innocent man. But I'm an innocent man, your honor, and I have always been an innocent man.

"You all convicted and had a wrong man in prison, and you all still have somebody on the loose that killed someone."

Following his release on parole in 2009, Bunn went on to set up the nonprofit organisation AVoice4TheUnheard, which aims "to not let any of America’s 2,200,000 prisoners to feel neglected or underrepresented".

As for Hargrave, he has also been exonerated for the crime. On Monday, a judge informed him that his murder conviction had been tossed out after he served 24 years in prison.

A man who was freed from prison after serving 24 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit has been jailed once again after making a chilling confession.

Thomas had been freed after 24 years behind bars in 2017. (stock image) Credit: Doug Berry/Getty Images

Shaurn Thomas, 50, had been sentenced to life in prison in 1992 for a murder he had not committed.

Thomas was freed in 2017 after his conviction was overturned and was given a $4.1 million settlement on his release.

However, he has been jailed once again after pleading guilty on Thursday to another murder committed in 2023, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Thomas has been convicted of fatally shooting his girlfriend’s friend, Akeem Edwards, last year after the 38-year-old father allegedly failed to pay him $1,200 for cocaine Thomas had given him to sell, according to the outlet.

The outlet added that the judge at the plea hearing appeared stunned to find out that Thomas would risk another jail sentence after having spent almost half of his life behind bars, especially when the sum was comparatively small compared to the multi-million dollar payout he'd received.

Common Pleas Court Judge Roxanne Covington asked Thomas in his hearing on Thursday: "Are these facts true?", to which he replied: "Yes, Your Honor."

As well as the murder charge, Thomas also pleaded guilty to conspiracy, illegal gun possession, and other crimes.

Edwards' family has told the Enquirer that they hope Thomas is made to spend the rest of his life behind bars, with his sentencing having been scheduled for February.

Edwards' sister, Tyeisha Marshall, told the outlet: "There’s not enough time for them to possibly give him."

Thomas had previously been jailed when he was 20 years old after being convicted by a jury of the second-degree murder of a North Philadephia businessman in a robbery gone wrong, in which the man was shot dead in 1990.

However, his conviction was overturned in 2017 after a judge deemed that there had been issues with the police investigation, including failure to verify Thomas's alleged alibi, as well as new information on interrogation tactics involving alleged coconspirators.

Investigators had honed in on Thomas based on statements made by two alleged coconspirators, whose accounts of the incident had shifted before they later recanted their testimony, with one claiming detectives had fed him a false story and assaulted him until he repeated it, according to the outlet.

The Pennsylvania Innocence Project had campaigned for Thomas's release, and while prosecutors said they were not completely convinced that Thomas was completely innocent in the murder, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office declined to retry his case.

Featured image credit: Doug Berry/Getty Images

No matter how you look at it, the justice system in the USA is incredibly flawed. All too often we hear cases in which violent and dangerous offenders get away with relatively light sentences (take Brock Turner, for example, who only served three months after being reportedly found guilty of three felony counts of sexual assault, according to Time), while first-time offenders for non-violent crimes end up getting slapped with decade-long terms behind bars.

What's more, some crimes are so strange and uncommon that there is no real legislation in place to dictate exactly how much jail time they should warrant. When that happens, it's pretty much up to an individual judge to decide how severe the offense is, and what punishment it deserves.

This is exactly what happened in one case 16 years ago, when more than three hundred bodies were discovered to have been dumped on one site. The man responsible was named as 28-year-old Ray Brent Marsh, and he almost got slapped with an 8,000 year sentence.

However, there is far more to the case than the basic facts suggest - which is why, perhaps controversially, Marsh is now walking around today as a free man.

Marsh's crimes were discovered in February 2002, when a woman walking her dog came across a skull on a seemingly-empty plot of land. Police were called to investigate, and quickly discovered that there was not just one body part buried in the area, but thousands. Some were entire corpses - fresh enough that they could be readily identified - while others were fragments that had become mummified or rotten away to the point where it was unclear which bones belonged with which.

The gravesite was very quickly tied to Marsh, who was undeniably culpable for all the bodies having been dumped there. However, Marsh did not kill any of the people. In fact, he didn't commit any violent crimes towards them at all... because they were already dead when they came to him.

The 28-year-old was the manager of the Tri-State Crematory in Georgia, and had been employed to incinerate the bodies and provide the families of relatives with the cremated remains. Instead, however, Marsh had been pocketing the cash, disposing of the bodies in a cheaper way (i.e. by abandoning them in an unmarked mass grave), and furnishing relatives with fake ashes made from concrete dust and other materials.

Unsurprisingly, something like this had never happened before, and - as the desecration of a body wasn't a felony in Georgia at the time - nobody was really sure what to charge the man with.

Eventually, Marsh was arrested on more than 300 criminal violations, and was eventually charged with 787 counts of criminal activity. This included theft by deception, abusing a corpse, burial service related fraud and giving false statements - all of which combined could have landed him more than 8,000 years behind bars.

However, a plea bargain was made on the Crematorium Manager's behalf, and he only ended up serving a mere 12 years for his crimes.

Now, considering that Marsh's criminal antics were financially motivated, and did not involve anything of a violent nature, many people believed that a dozen years behind bars was a suitable punishment for the crime.

However, others were not so convinced.

Almost 1,700 members of the families of the identified corpses sued Tri-State and the funeral homes that had shipped the bodies to the crematorium, and were granted nearly $40 million in compensation.

"As the daughter of someone who wound up there, 12 years is not enough," wrote Tiffany Daniel Duffy in a response to a Facebook post from a local news outlet. "When we found out what had happened, it was like she'd died all over again. Those of you who say 12 years is enough, and that he did his time: I have no idea where my mother wound up. Is 12 years really enough time? Had it happened to you, you'd think what we're all thinking."

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As one of the conditions of his reduced sentence, Marsh was forced to promise never to profit from his crimes, meaning that he is essentially bound by law to never speak of them. As a result, we probably won't ever find out more about why he decided to do the things he did - but some have suggested that the toxic fumes he had been inhaling for years from other cremated bodies may have affected his better judgment.

Either way, the man was lucky to have gotten away with such a light sentence, not just because it could have originally been closer to a good few centuries, but - more importantly - because he hurt so many innocent families in the process of committing his crimes.

More than 100 of the bodies are still unidentified to this day, and it is likely that they will remain that way forever.

An American inmate has opened up about some of the thoughts he's had on his own life after being arrested and convicted.

Texas native Jeremy Busby was sentenced to 75 years in prison after being convicted of murder in 1999.

Just 19 at the time of the shooting, he was with a woman when they were approached by two men in a motel parking lot, who became hostile as they believed he was there to buy drugs.

They were mistaken, Jeremy says, and after he was threatened with physical violence and tried to stop the situation from escalating, he fatally shot the man because he feared for his life.

With no previous arrests for violence, Jeremy was held for four months in Dallas County Jail, as his website JoinJeremy adds that he "was represented at trial by a defense attorney who conducted no pretrial investigation and called no witnesses."

An all-white jury would find him guilty, and Jeremy remains incarcerated, almost 20 years after the “Stand Your Ground law” was codified in Texas back in 2007, which supporters argue would have strengthened his self-defense claim.

Texan prisoner Jeremy Busby has spoken about some of his regrets in life after being sentenced to 75 years behind bars. Credit: Jeremy Busby

Jeremy Busby's regrets about life

The Texas-based prisoner spoke exclusively to VT about his experiences both before prison and after spending over 25 years behind bars.

Jeremy opened up about losing his single mother at age three, while also growing up in the foster care system, surrounded by drugs, guns, and violence.

"I grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood. My mom was kidnapped and murdered when I was three years old, and that set off a bunch of negative consequences in my life," he said.

Jeremy explained: “Most of those negative consequences prohibited me and stagnated my growth, and prohibited me from understanding what humanity or life was really all about."

“It was only after I came to prison that I realized that the world is a lot bigger than the crime-ridden neighborhood that I grew up in, for example, that average people don't carry guns and don't settle disputes with violence,” the inmate admitted.

Jeremy has since become an academic and a journalist while in prison, taking time to attend college and work on his craft.

Reflecting on his life in the outside world, he admitted: "I was surrounded with crime, a bunch of poverty and poor education - my world was very, very small and I didn't have an outlet to see the bigger picture of people who were going to work and developing their skills, going off to college..."

He admitted that these concepts were first introduced to him in prison, adding: "Those are the only things I can actually say that I wish I had done differently; it wasn't very much that I could have done differently."

The US inmate has been in prison since 1999. Credit: Jeremy Busby

The issues with society

Jeremy spoke about some of the issues in society and how people with challenging socioeconomic backgrounds can struggle to be successful, stating: "I wish that there were more resources for people like me."

The journalist, who previously became the first black staff writer at Texas prison newspaper, The ECHO, added: "Because all the resources and all the things we're taught are very limited, there wasn't very much that I could do with the information that I had."

He said his life was transformed after going to prison because he gained greater access to information.

"That's pretty much the nutshell about my youth, because I committed this crime at the age of 19, and I've been in prison ever since."

Speaking about the failed structure of society, Jeremy said: "I think we are still faced with the same situations here in prison.

"I see young guys come in all the time, that reminds me of my 19-year-old self; they have a single-parent household, sometimes they grow up as an orphan as I did, and they don't have any positive role models."

Jeremy believes that this is an issue that needs to be resolved to stop this vicious cycle, also citing a lack of positive role models.

He then made a powerful revelation about many in similar situations to him: "The first time they left their neighborhood, the crime-ridden ghetto they grew up in, is when they got in the back seat of the police car.

"The first time that they left the city where they grew up is when they were transported to the prison system, so it's hard to expect people who wake up surrounded by gang violence, drugs, and poverty, as well as people who are suffering from drug addiction and mental illness."

Jeremy Busby thinks that there's a structural issue with society. Credit: Jeremy Busby

Jeremy Busby's life changed when he went to prison

He also opened up about strain theory, which Jeremy says explains how society functions across the world, as "people have to work with the resources that they have available to them."

"When you don't have the proper resources available, then you have to utilize abnormal methods," the inmate said.

Jeremy explained: "There are solutions to fix that. And sadly, in the 28 years, this is my 28th year in prison, I have seen little to no change in any of it."

Looking back at his sentencing, Jeremy candidly admitted: "I remember minutes afterwards they locked me into this jail cell. I was all by myself, and I stayed there for, like, about an hour, and I was constantly thinking about what that meant for me."

"What it really means is that I'm going to have to spend at least the next 30 calendar years inside of prison before I become eligible for release back into society, and that hit me pretty hard."

Featured image credit: Jeremy Busby