Miguel Solorio, a California resident aged 44, has been incarcerated for the past 25 years in connection with a homicide that he did not perpetrate.
Has been officially pardoned and ordered for immediate release. The decision came from Superior Court Judge William Ryan during a court hearing held in Los Angeles on Thursday, marking a historic moment in the quest for justice.
Solorio was arrested in 1998 in connection with a fatal drive-by shooting that occurred in Whittier, southeast of Los Angeles. Afterward, he was found guilty and received a life sentence without the possibility of release. A verdict that would cast a shadow over his life for more than two decades.
The pivotal moment in Solorio’s arduous journey toward exoneration was marked by the remarkable work of his legal team from the Northern California Innocence Project.
During the hearing, Solorio expressed his profound gratitude, referring to his attorneys as his “dream team.” Overwhelmed with emotion, he remarked, “It’s like a dream I don’t want to wake up from. This day finally came.”
The attorneys representing Solorio had persistently argued that his conviction rested on flawed eyewitness identification practices, a systemic issue contributing to many wrongful convictions.
Last month, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office issued a letter affirming, with unwavering confidence, that Solorio was entitled to his freedom, acknowledging the egregious miscarriage of justice.
Central to the wrongful conviction was the now-debunked practice of repeatedly presenting witnesses with photographs of the same person, a technique known to contaminate their memory. Shockingly, even before the case gained public attention, four eyewitnesses who were shown Solorio’s photo did not identify him as the suspect.
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Some of them even pointed to a different individual. Instead of exploring alternative leads, law enforcement persisted in showing the witnesses photos of Solorio until, under duress, some eventually identified him as the perpetrator.
Sarah Pace, an attorney with the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law, decried the case as “a tragic example of what happens when law enforcement officials develop tunnel vision in their pursuit of a suspect.” She commented, “Once a witness mentioned Solorio’s name, law enforcement officers zeroed in on only him, disregarding other evidence and possible suspects and putting their judgment about guilt or innocence above the facts.”
The letter from the district attorney’s office also highlighted a significant development in the science of witness memory. In 2020, a new documentable scientific consensus emerged, indicating that a witness’s memory for a suspect should be tested only once, as even the test itself could contaminate the witness’s memory.
As Solorio prepares to step out of Mule Creek State Prison, located southeast of Sacramento, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has up to five days to process his release.
His case serves as a poignant reminder of the imperative need for justice reform and the relentless pursuit of truth in the criminal justice system. Miguel Solorio’s long-overdue exoneration marks a victory for justice, and a step towards rectifying a profound injustice that spanned a quarter of a century.
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