Black man, 66, who has spent 47 years in jail for raping and kidnapping a white woman could be finally be released after victim, now 71, admits she may have mistakenly identified him

Incarcerated at 18, Tyrone Clark, now 66, has spent 47 years in prison after he was convicted of raping and kidnapping Anne Kane, 23, in June 1973

Clark, who was 18 at the time, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after he was found guilty

On Friday, Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins filed a motion supporting Clark’s petition for a new trial after Kane claimed she mistakenly identified him

In the letter which thee victim addressed to the Parole Board, she stated: ‘I am no longer absolutely sure that my identification was correct’

Kane who is a white woman, said she trusted the Boston courts to provide a fair trial at the time, but now sees flaws within the criminal justice system

She argues that because she didn’t know any black people at the time, her ability to properly identify her assailant was affected

If a judge grants a motion to vacate Clark’s rape conviction, the rape charges will be dropped and Clark will be set free.

The district attorney in a Massachusetts county is pleading with a judge to overturn a 1974 rape conviction of a black man who has spent five decades in prison, after his victim previously admitted she may have mistakenly identified him. 
Tyrone Clark, now 66, spent 47 years in prison after he was convicted of raping and kidnapping Anne Kane, 23, in June 1973, after he broke into her Back Bay apartment and raped her at knifepoint. 
Clark, who was 18 at the time, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
Rachael Rollin, the District Attorney for Suffolk County, on Friday filed a motion supporting Clark’s petition for a new trial, citing a 2019 letter Kane, now 71, with the Parole Board about Clark’s innocence. 
According to the letter, Kane stated: ‘I am no longer absolutely sure that my identification was correct.’ 
Kane, who is a white woman, said she trusted the courts to provide a fair trial at the time, but now sees the overwhelming flaws within the criminal justice system. 
She argues that because she didn’t know any black people at the time, her ability to properly identify her assailant was affected.  
‘It is a well proven fact at this point that eyewitness identification is incredibly unreliable, and I had no experience in differentiating black faces,’ Kane said. ‘I can see how I might have been wrong.’ 
During his interview with GBH, Clark said he’s appreciative of Kane for speaking out and feels only empathy for her situation.
‘I feel sad concerning what happened to her back then,’ he said. ‘But I feel good that she came forward. It took a lot of years to come forward.’

In an interview with GBH Monday, Rollins said she doesn’t ‘believe justice was done with respect to the rape charge,’ as the case awaits a new hearing in Suffolk County Superior Court.
Rollins said her office’s Integrity Review Bureau reviewed Kane’s letter and additional details of the case and discovered the state inadvertently destroyed key evidence that could have aided Clark’s cause.  
She added that Clark’s sentence was ‘significant’ especially for a crime where the victim managed to survive.
‘Life with the possibility of parole for a crime where the person lived is a very significant sentence,’ Rollins said. ‘Hopefully he’ll be able to be released.’    
Clark’s attorney, Jeffrey Harris has been fighting to prove his client’s innocence since 2017 and believes Clark’s sentence was motivated by race.
‘He was convicted by an all-white jury based on cross-racial identifications,’ Harris told GBH.
‘It was 1973, the height of racism in Boston.’    
During trial, Kane recalled the evening of her rape as a ‘nightmare,’ explaining how her assailant forced his way into her apartment, raped her, beat her and took her through the city on a 6 1/2-hour saga. 

The motion supporting Clark’s petition for a new trial, was, sent to the Parole Board about Clark’s innocence

Filing a motion supporting Clark’s petition for a new trial, Rollins, the Suffolk DA is requesting that a judge grant a motion to vacate Clark’s rape conviction, the rape charges will be dropped and Clark will be set free.
Anne Kane in her testimony, said her assailant took her to a restaurant, where they ate a meal and spoke to some of his friends.
She managed to escape after running into a Roxbury firehouse and begging a fireman for help.
Court records indicate that Kane’s assailant followed her into the firehouse, but fled after a fireman said he would call in a police officer in the building.
Four fireman and a server at the restaurant all identified Clark during the trial.    
According to Sam Gross, founder and senior editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, it’s not uncommon for multiple witnesses to identify the wrong person.    
Gross notes that in two thirds of rape cases, exonerees were falsely convicted primarily because of mistaken eyewitness identifications – half of which were black men who were convicted of assaulting white women.   
If a judge grants a motion to vacate Clark’s rape conviction, the rape charges will be dropped and Clark will be set free. 
Initiated in 2019, the Integrity Review Bureau was tasked with reviewing more than 100 cases and took action in 10 cases in addition to Clark’s, Rollins said, adding *’We are not afraid in this administration to look back and see if we got it right or wrong,’ she said. 

The registry notes that of more than 2,851 people across the United States have been exonerated of their crimes since 1989, and examines how they went wrong.
Mistakes are much more likely to be caught in rape cases, he said, because rapists usually leave semen which can be tested for DNA. In two thirds of such cases, exonerees were convicted largely by mistaken eyewitness identifications, he said. Half of the cases involve Black men who were convicted of assaulting white women, a racial combination that only occurs in a small minority of rape cases.
America’s racial history has much responsibility to bear, gross says, but it doesn’t explain everything.
“The biggest cause is the great difficulty that white Americans have in correctly identifying black strangers,’’ Gross said. Anne Kane says a day after her assault she was invited to the Boston police headquarters to view hundreds of mug shots of likely suspects – She didn’t recognize anybody.
A day later, when she was invited back to view another set of 11 photos. she identified Clark. He’d been placed in the mix after being identified by an informant, court records show.
“It did seem to me that if this was a small pool, they must have some idea,’’ she said. “So I went through all the pictures and when I came to Tyrone Clark’s picture, I felt like I had been kicked in the gut.”
However Kane said, the first time she saw him in court, Clark didn’t look like her attacker. She says she first saw him while waiting for a probable cause hearing, and turned to a detective and said, “He looks so different.’’ She tried to quell her concerns when a detective told her: “They all look different when they are dressed up for trial.’’
Harris argued in a motion last year that this information was never relayed to the public defender -— but Judge Roach rejected the argument saying such information likely wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the case.
Tyrone Clark was arrested and booked by the Boston police in June of 1973, three days after the assault.
Clark, then aged 18, says he was living in a halfway house after serving six months for an assault charge. He had grown up in a series of foster homes before dropping out of school at 16, challenged by a learning disability.
Clark says he was completely confused the day of the arrest.
“I says, ‘You got the wrong person. I never did nothing,’’’ he said.
“They told me to shut up, handcuffed me and took me to headquarters,” he said.
Clark had several alibis, none of which convinced the jury. He speaks with a pronounced stutter that the victim did not describe at the time of the arrest. The jury found him guilty after about three hours of deliberations in January 1974, court records show.
Clark was released on parole in 2005 and sent back 14 months later after being caught stealing from a Roxbury store. Sitting on the grounds of the Gardner state prison, Clark said he deeply regrets that misstep and hopes that if he is eventually released he’ll be able to live out his days in a trouble-free life.
He says he feels only appreciation for Kane’s decision to speak out and feels only empathy for her situation.
I feel sad concerning what happened to her back then,’’ he said. “But I feel good that she came forward. It took a lot of years to come forward.”