After an individual is sentenced to a period of time behind bars, they are often sent to prison straight away.
That wasn't the case for one particular man, however, as he was never actually taken to jail - despite receiving a 13 year sentence.
The case of Cornealious Anderson is certainly a surprising story, and one you'd expect from a some kind of Shawshank Redemption type film.
The Missouri man was convicted and sentenced back in 1999 for the armed robbery of a Burger King manager while he was making a bank deposit.
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After that, Anderson posted bail and appealed his sentence - with the latter being denied.
But while all of this was happening, no one ever came to lock him up.
Somehow, it looked like Anderson had got away with it, and he began to carry in his life as normal, even joining a church, starting a small business, getting married and becoming a father of four.
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He was a youth football coach and generally lived an upstanding life, without ever making any effort to conceal his identity.
But while Anderson was living that somewhat normal life, his original lawyer and almost everyone else involved in the case had assumed the robber had gone to prison.
Eventually, however, the Missouri Department of Corrections discovered that a clerical error meant Anderson had never actually gone to prison in the first place.
Anderson had spent what sounds like a happy 13 years - the length of his sentence - out of jail, but in 2013 a SWAT team came to his home and arrested him.
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Recalling the moment to Jessica Lussenhop, as told on NPR's This American Life, Anderson said: "I was sleeping. I was awoken. I was about 6 o'clock in the morning, woken by knocking at the door. And it was unusual knocking.
"It was the consistent knocking-- you know, the hard knocking. So I knew something-- what is going on?
"So I just stood at the top of the stairs for a moment. And finally I said, who is it? I'm in my boxers. And they said, marshals. Open it up or it's coming down. Opened up the door.
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"As soon as I opened up the door, it was a small army. I mean, it was about eight of them. They had the shields. They had the helmets. They had the AR-15 style machine-looking guns. And they had the street blocked off. And I said, hey man, you got the wrong person. And he just looked at me. He said, 'no, you're the right person'."
Anderson was taken to prison but after nine months, his request for release was granted, with Judge Terry Lynn Brown saying his life over the previous 13 years had led him to believe he was a 'changed man'.
Callum Jones