The man on he right is Edward Clayton Taylor. He spent 32 years in prison because the testimony of Stephanie Love, then 4 years old and a victim of sexual assault, provided testimony that was poorly interpreted - or, shall I say, completely misinterpreted - and led to the conviction of Taylor for the child rape and his sentence to the term of life without parole. This sentence was passed even though there was no physical evidence tying Taylor to the crime. If anything, the fact that Love's rape resulted in her venereal disease and Taylor had been arrested soon after the accident, medically examined in jail and found to have been free of that disease would be strong evidence that he most likely was not the suspect.
This tremendous wrong was, thankfully, discovered and at least partially rectified. Taylor is now a free man. But his story speaks volumes to how faulty the justice system is and shows how shallow and uninformed the thinking is of those who choose to trust court verdicts as some sort of a solid assurance and guarantee of truth or justice.
References
Deemed a child rapist for 36 years, a Jacksonville man is absolved in a case of mistaken identity
Dan Scanlan, Florida Times-Union, 20 May 2022
I am sorry for him and his lost years. They might make a movie about this story.
They might.
What I suspect they would not do - at least, not willingly - is institute mandatory sanctions against all involved in injustices of this sort (police, prosecutors, etc.)