But thanks to DNA evidence and the Innocence Project, Haynesworth, 46, has won his freedom after 27 years behind bars.
Virginia Attorney General Ken T. Cuccinelli II and two prosecutors announced this week that DNA evidence points to another man in the rapes of five women in the mid-1980s.
Haynesworth was an 18-year-old high school dropout on a shopping errand for his mother, when he was stopped and questioned by police. He didn't have a criminal record, but five women identified him as their attacker.
He was convicted of three attacks
A hero in this case is former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who ordered a review of thousands of cases from 1973 to 1988. With the help of better DNA-scoping technology, the Haynesworth case was among those reviewed.
The result was that Haynesworth was cleared and that a convicted rapist named Leon Davis was implicated in the attacks.
Both Davis and Haynesworth shared the same blood type, lived in the same neighborhood and bore a slightly similar resemblance.
Considering those factors, it is somewhat understandable how Haynesworth was caught up in the nightmare of being convicted for a crime he didn't commit.
But that doesn't make it right, and that doesn't absolve all other states from following Warner's model and using enhanced-DNA techniques to review criminal cases where there is some doubt that the right perpetrator was caught.
I understand state budgets are tight with teachers, nurses and other essential workers being laid off, but freeing convicts who did nothing wrong other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time or having inadequate legal representation should be a priority.
Something else to think about is that many of these wrongly accused cases occur in states like Texas and Virginia that employ the death penalty with a regularity and ease that boggles the mind.
So the question must be asked: Just how many times did Texas and Virginia send innocent men to their deaths?
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