(CNN) — By the time Edward Lee Elmore won his freedom at age 53, he had spent 30 years — most of them on death row — imprisoned in South Carolina for a crime he says he did not commit.
Law enforcement planted evidence and prosecutors manipulated facts to cast Elmore as the only suspect in the 1982 murder of 75-year-old Dorothy Edwards, his lawyers claim.
Even with seemingly overwhelming evidence in Elmore's favor, it took nearly two decades to win his release, in what an appeals court called "one of those exceptional cases of 'extreme malfunctions in the state criminal justice systems.' "