Man who spent 50 years in jail for murder he didn't commit given staggering payout - but only after fighting for it
Glynn Simmons was released from prison in 2023 at the age of 70, having served a jail sentence of half a century for a murder he did not commit, and becoming the longest serving wrongful conviction exoneree in US history.
The 73-year-old spent 48 years of his life, two of which were on death row, for the the 1974 murder of Carolyn Sue Rogers.
"I don't call it a miscarriage of justice. It wasn't a mistake. It was a deliberate act. It was a conscious disregard of justice," he said, speaking to the BBC a year after he was released. Initially, Simmons received just $175,000 from the state upon his release in 2023, but the following year he was granted much more after filing a civil rights lawsuit.
Rogers died after two armed men broke into a liquor store in Edmond, Oklahoma, where the 30-year-old was working as a store clerk.
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She was shot in the head and subsequently died, but an 18-year-old customer, Belinda Brown, survived the attack.
At the time of the crime, Simmons was around 700 miles away in Harvey, Louisiana, celebrating the holidays with family and friends.
During his trial, which lasted just three days, six witnesses came forward to corroborate his alibi.
How was Simmons wrongfully convicted of murder?
While investigating the robbery, police were also looking into several similar cases, including another murder, that had been confessed to by a man named Leonard Patterson.
Patterson had attended a party just a month earlier where Simmons was also present, and police rounded up as many partygoers as they could find and placed them in lineups.
The surviving victim of the liquor store murder, Brown, identified Simmons as the gunman - he was later convicted and given the death penalty.
However, later evidence revealed that Brown had previously identified other suspects, and that her description of the shooter did not match Simmons.
The jury were never told of these inconsistencies.
How much was paid to Simmons?
Nearly five decades on, Simmons's attorneys uncovered police reports that had not been disclosed to the defense, and raised doubts about the reliability of Brown's identification.
And by the time the conviction was overturned, prosecutors acknowledged there was never any physical evidence tying Simmons to the crime.
Simmons filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Edmond and the estate of Anthony David Garrett, former Edmond detective, and after his initial payment of just $175,000, he was g a granted a further $7.15 million settlement by Edmond City Council in 2024, for the 48 years he spent wrongfully incarcerated.
According to Loevy and Lovey, Simmons’s lead attorney, Elizabeth Wang, said, “Mr. Simmons spent a tragic amount of time incarcerated for a crime he did not commit. Although he will never get that time back, this settlement with Edmond will allow him to move forward while also continuing to press his claims against the Oklahoma City defendants. We are very much looking forward to holding them accountable at trial in March.”
And according to the National Registry of Exonerations, black people are around 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder in the US than white people.
"There's been anger there for almost 50 years - anger, bitterness," he said.
"But you have to regulate it or it'll eat you up - what's been done can't be undone, so I don't wallow in it."
Mia Williams