Falsely Jailed Man Dies 1 Month Out of Prison

A Mississippi man who spent more than 30 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit has died less than a month after his name was cleared in the case, the Associated Press reports.

Bobby Ray Dixon died Sunday from cancer. He was 53. Jerry Dixon says he's glad his brother lived long enough to see himself cleared by DNA evidence in the 1979 rape and murder of a Hattiesburg woman.

In September, a circuit judge set aside the guilty pleas of Bobby Ray Dixon and another man in the slaying of Eva Gail Patterson after the Innocence Project New Orleans filed a petition on their behalf. The judge is expected to rule later on a posthumous petition for a third man, Larry Ruffin, who died in prison in 2002.

Dixon had been released from prison in August on a medical release given inmates who have a terminal illness, reports The Clarion-Ledger. He had been receiving chemotherapy for advanced lung cancer and a brain tumor.

In interviews, Dixon said that not only did he have no idea what the victim looked like, but that police had beaten and coerced him into confessing to the crime.

The Innocence Project reports that 63 confessions like Dixon's have been proven false through DNA around the country since 1990.

Upon official exoneration for his crimes, Dixon told the press, "I was done wrong. I know that."