A Vietnam veteran who spent almost eight years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit is suing Westchester County, the town of Greenburgh and several people he says played a role in his wrongful arrest and incarceration.
Leonard Mack, 73, was exonerated last year after DNA testing confirmed his innocence and identified the person who prosecutors said actually committed the 1975 rape. Now, Mack is seeking accountability for the decades he spent under the shadow of a wrongful conviction.
“It was horrible to be charged with such a horrific crime,” he told Gothamist. “I thought it was a dream that I was going to wake up from.”
Westchester County and Greenburgh officials did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
Mack was arrested about 50 years ago, after two teenage girls reported they were stopped at gunpoint, blindfolded and gagged while walking home from school in Greenburgh, according to court records. One of the teens was raped, according to prosecutors.
The teens told police the assailant was a young Black man with a gold earring who was wearing a black hat, tan jacket and dark pants, Mack’s lawsuit states. A couple of hours later, according to the suit, officers spotted Mack driving along the Bronx River Parkway, noted he was a Black man in his early 20s and pulled him over, even though he was wearing a yellow tank top and blue checkered pants. He told police he didn’t rape anyone and had been with his girlfriend that afternoon, according to the lawsuit, but they found a revolver in his trunk and arrested him for gun possession.
In 1976, Mack was convicted of weapon possession. But he was also convicted of first-degree rape, even though a test of bodily fluids had determined before trial he was not a match for the semen found at the crime scene, the lawsuit states. He was sentenced to 7.5 to 15 years in prison.
“When I heard the word ‘guilty,’ everything just went blank,” Mack said in an interview. “I remember standing there, looking toward the judge, looking toward the bench, but I didn’t see nothing.”
Mack said he filed appeals from prison and leaned on his spirituality to keep his spirits up. He said phone calls, care packages and visits from family also helped him to remain hopeful — though his mother refused to visit.
“My mother said she could not bear to see her child, who she birthed in this world, who she knows didn’t commit this crime and was put in prison, she could not come to see him behind bars,” he said.
Mack said he felt confident he would one day be found innocent.
“I just kept saying, ‘I’m gonna fight this until I prove my innocence. I don’t care how long it takes,’” he remembers telling himself. “‘As long as I have breath in my body, I’m gonna fight this, because I knew I didn’t do it.’”
A couple of years ago, the Westchester County District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit agreed to reinvestigate the case, following a request from the nonprofit Innocence Project. The office found DNA from the crime scene matched the DNA of another man who was convicted of a rape in Queens that happened just a couple of weeks after the assault in Greenburgh. The DNA testing excluded Mack as a perpetrator.
The review also uncovered suggestive procedures police had used to convince eyewitnesses to identify Mack, even though he didn’t match the original description of the suspect. The lawsuit alleges police used various tactics to try to convince the teens that Mack was the assailant after they both failed to recognize him, including showing them a misleading photo array and having them look at Mack in a room where he was the only Black person.
The DA’s office and the Innocence Project asked a judge to overturn Mack’s conviction last year, and the judge agreed.
Mack said he filed his lawsuit because he doesn’t want anyone else to be wrongfully convicted like he was. His children were two months and three years old when he was arrested, he said. His daughter died before her father was exonerated, Mack explained through tears on a phone call on Monday. He said his son didn’t learn until later why his dad was in prison all that time.
“I had something to fight for,” Mack said. “Get back home with my family. Get back home to my son. Get back home to my daughter.”
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