A man, Maurice Hastings, aged 72, has received a substantial monetary settlement described as the largest ever in the state’s history for a wrongful conviction case. He was wrongly found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole for the 1983 sexual assault and murder of Roberta Wydermyer, who died from a single gunshot wound to the head.
Allegations were made against two Inglewood Police Department officers and a Los Angeles District Attorney’s investigator for framing Hastings. Despite his continuous claims of innocence, Hastings endured a lengthy legal battle.
After spending 38 years behind bars in a California prison, Hastings was granted a $25 million settlement, finalized in August. In a statement, he expressed that while no amount of money could make up for the lost years, the settlement marked the end of a long journey, allowing him to move forward.
The specific terms of the settlement remain undisclosed. Following Wydermyer’s post-mortem examination, a sexual assault test was conducted, and biological evidence from the perpetrator was collected. Hastings requested DNA testing in 2000, which was initially denied by the DA’s office. However, in 2021, DNA testing proved his innocence as the semen found did not match Hastings’.
In 2022, Hastings’ conviction was overturned at the age of 69, based on the DNA evidence linking another individual, Kenneth Packnett, to the crime. Packnett had been previously convicted of a similar offense. Despite Packnett being arrested shortly after the murder in 1983 for a different crime, he was not investigated for Wydermyer’s murder.
Packnett passed away in 2020 while serving a separate sentence. In 2023, a California judge officially declared Hastings as “factually innocent.” He now resides in Southern California and is actively involved in his local church.
Nick Brustin, Hastings’ legal representative, emphasized the accountability of law enforcement agencies in preventing such injustices in the future, stating that there are consequences for allowing such misconduct to occur.