2 Georgia men released after 25 years of wrong imprisonment

Two Georgia men who were convicted of murder in connection with the shooting death of their friend in 1996 and sentenced to 25 years in prison were released this week, according to their attorneys, after fresh evidence revealed in a true-crime podcast last year established their innocence.

When Darrell Lee Clark and his co-defendant Cain Joshua Storey were detained for their claimed role in the killing of 15-year-old Brian Bowling, they were both 17 years old.

According to Clark's attorneys with the charitable Georgia Innocence Project, Christina Cribbs and Meagan Hurley, he passed away from a gunshot wound to the head in his family's mobile home on October 18, 1996.

Storey was charged with involuntary manslaughter, but several months later, police started looking into the death as a homicide. They spoke with two witnesses, and their testimony led them to believe that Clark was responsible for Bowling's death, according to the Georgia Innocence Project.

"Despite the circumstances, which strongly indicated that Bowling accidentally shot himself in the head, at the urging of Bowling's family members, police later began investigating the death as a homicide," according to a motion filed by Clark's attorneys, requesting a new trial.

Following a week-long trial in 1998, the two adolescents were found guilty of murder and conspiring to commit murder and given a life sentence.

After Susan Simpson and Jacinda Davis of the true-crime podcast Proof started looking into Clark's case in 2021 and spoke with two of the state's major witnesses, his exoneration came about a year and a half later.

According to the podcasters' investigation, fresh information "shattered the state's premise of Clark's culpability" in Bowling's death, and they flagged his case to the Georgia Innocence Project.

According to the Georgia Innocence Project, the teens confessed they had "planned the murder of Bowling because he knew too much about a prior theft Storey and Clark had committed" after speaking with the first witness, a woman who lived close to Bowling's home. She was interviewed by police.

According to Clark's demand for a new trial, Storey was charged with murder based on her evidence, and Clark was detained as a co-conspirator despite having a verifiable alibi that he was at home the night of the shooting and was backed up by two witnesses.

The Georgia Innocence Project, however, notes that the woman admitted in the podcast that police had forced her into making false claims and had threatened to take her children away if she didn't comply.

According to the news release, Clark was recognized in a photo lineup by the second witness, a guy who was in a different room of the Bowlings' house at the time of the shooting, as the person he had seen rushing through the yard the night Bowling was shot.

According to the Georgia Innocence Project, it was discovered in the podcast that the man's testimony was based on an "unrelated, factually identical shooting" that he saw in 1976 and that he never named Clark as the person in the yard or saw anyone in the yard on the night of the shooting.

In an interview with CNN, Davis said that although she and Simpson had no expectations when they first began their research, as they spoke with more people, it became "obvious that it just wasn't adding up."

"It took us a long time to talk to both of those witnesses. The podcast was happening in almost real-time as an investigation. When we finally found and were able to talk to those two witnesses, it really solidified that both of these guys had been wrongly convicted," Davis said.

Hurley told CNN that Clark's attorneys submitted filings in September to contest his conviction and request a new trial, citing fresh evidence that demonstrated his conviction was founded on falsified evidence and coercion.

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