Cory Epps
Case Details
Served: 20 years
Year of Exoneration: 2017
Year of Conviction: 1998
Sentence: 25 to life
Conviction: Murder
County: Erie
In 2017, Cory Epps was exonerated after serving 20 years. Cory was convicted of a 1997 road rage murder he did not commit based solely on the testimony of a single eyewitness to the crime. The evidence that proved Cory's innocence was developed by EXI over 7 years and implicated the true killer who, the DA acknowledged, looked "eerily similar" to Cory, exposing the fallibility of eyewitness identification evidence. After a year of aggressive litigation on the part of EXI, the prosecution consented to vacate the conviction and dismiss the case in the eleventh hour on Friday, December 1st.
Throughout his 20 years of wrongful incarceration, Cory held on to hope by thinking of his family: “My wife, my mother, and my family, we are a strong-knit family, and the one thing that my mother always taught me is to never give up.”
