He is far from the only one who went through a scenario like that.

Also one thing I fucking HATE with a vengeance is how some people say 'the process will eventually work and his/her innocent will get asserted'. That isn't a guarantee, but even if it did... after what? Spending days or weeks in a jail cell? Being treated like a non-human criminal by guards and the system? Spending large amounts of money you won't get back and huge amounts of stress pommelled onto you and your family (and I have heard of some people's family getting so stressed during the process that they had heart attacks and died). Your reputation in society being crushed even if you are acquitted beyond all doubt.

And what if something goes wrong? What if the 'system' fails anyway and you spend years in prison writing appeals to get a second chance. Some people have spent many years, even decades, behind bars doing this, and meanwhile their accusers got to go on with their lives and 100% forgot about everything while you had to take a shit in a cell in front of another cellmate and vice versa. In the TV show Law & Order they had the smug ass prosecutor say that 'mistakes can still be corrected' or something to that effect when talking about a man who was wrongly convicted of a rape he had nothing to do with and spent 30 years behind bars before being acquitted.

That shit made me want to puke. You know what 30 years looks like? 30 years ago was 1995 (or almost 1996, it is December after all). If a person was wrongly accused of rape in December 1995 and they were a 20 year old trade/college student, they would be 50 years old when they are released when the truth comes out. What will life be like for them? Being told that the system 'worked' but basically their lives are utterly destroyed anyway.

I remember reading comments on cracked.com whenever they had an article about how the legal system is so skewed and so fucked that a user would comment with their experience as a lawyer that his sheer disgust at not only the system, but how incredibly petty people can be and how often they get away with it. Like the story of a black guy who was constantly falsely accused of stealing by an elderly white woman who even went so far as to talk to police as to how to convincingly come up with ways to put that n-word in jail. This is even though that black guy was not a thief, drug dealer, drug user, or any other such thing. He was just a guy with a simple job and living a quiet life. But she didn't like him for racist reasons and other crap.

The result? This guy was dragged through the legal system multiple times, but was acquitted each time. In the end the court and the judges realized just what a racist bullshitter the white woman was and put a restraining order against him and dismissed all charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be brought back up again under any circumstances.

Happy ending? Nope. The black guy lost his job, his home, his car, all his money, his wife divorced him, and when he was let go from the jail he was held him he literally only had the clothes on his back and no money and was on the other side of the state from where he lived. But hey, at least he didn't have a criminal record... but in many places simply having an arrest record is just as bad. Exactly nothing happened to the elderly white woman who did this to him. She got to live on her life exactly as she did before.

Stories like these never leave my mind.