A woman who was unjustly sentenced to 35 years in a US jail for murder now receives $ 3 million in compensation. Cathy Woods was awarded the sum, according to her lawyer, as a partial settlement in a civil case by a Washoe County County Commission.
Apparently, Woods does not consider this payment sufficient: The now 68-year-old wants to receive additional compensation from the city of Reno in the US state of Nevada and from the former investigators. Woods accuses them of forcing a false confession when she was a 1979 patient in a psychiatric hospital in the US state of Louisiana.
Woods was released from prison in 2015 after new evidence relieved her of murdering a student. DNA on a cigarette butt linked the case to a man already convicted of two more murders in the San Francisco area.
According to a national registry on rehabilitation, no other woman in US history was wrongfully held in prison longer than Woods.
In February, a similar case became known: In 1980, a California court sentenced a man named Craig Coley to life imprisonment for murder. He was accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend and her son.
A DNA test many years later revealed that he could not have committed the crime. In November 2017, Coley was finally released - after 39 years in prison. The city of Simi Valley agreed with Coley on a compensation payment of $ 21 million.
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