A former letter carrier who was sentenced to death for the 1991 murder of a cocktail waitress in Phoenix, Ariz., has been exonerated by DNA testing and freed from prison.
Ray Krone, 44, walked out of prison in Yuma, Ariz., late Monday after being incarcerated for a decade.
Krone has always maintained his innocence, despite being convicted twice of stabbing Kim Ancona to death on Dec. 29, 1991. Krone was initially sentenced death in 1992. That sentence was overturned in 1995 but he was convicted again the following year and sentenced to life.
Although Krone was no longer on death row, a bevy of capital punishment foes, including Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the American Civil Liberties Union and the Justice Project, described Krone on Tuesday as the 100th person in the United States who had been sentenced to death but exonerated since executions resumed in the mid-1970s.
For every seven people executed in the United States in the past quarter century, one has been exonerated'an error rate that death penalty critics say is unacceptably high.
