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A Maryland man sentenced to life plus 60 years served 27 years in prison before being released on Feb. 9, 2023.

According to the Prisons and Justice Initiative, the Baltimore City Circuit judge reduced Kenneth Bond’s sentence due to the state’s 2021 Juvenile Restoration Act (JRA), which allowed a sentence reduction to those who have served at least 20 years.

Bond was handed a life sentence plus 60 years for a crime he maintains he didn’t commit.

“Just because they give you life plus 60, that doesn’t mean that your life is over,” Bon said. “That means that your struggle begins.”

Bond was incarcerated at 16 for the Nov. 27, 1995, death of Morgan State University Terrence McKoy. According

to the Justice for Kenneth Bond project, McKoy was the victim of an “unsuccessful armed robbery at a bus station” while waiting for an MTA bus to take him to his off-campus apartment, a 1995 Baltimore Sun article read.

McKoy was shot once in his chest and transported to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was pronounced dead minutes later. A 10-year-old boy named Robert Lucas, riding in a van with his mother, obtained a bullet wound from the incident and recovered at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center—Bond was charged with attempted murder for Lucas.

Two years after the crime, Bond was convicted on only two faulty pieces of evidence: ballistics examination and eyewitness identification.

Police discovered extractor marks on the shell casings at the crime scene. But because investigators didn’t have the murder weapon, there was no way to tell that the bullets found in Bond’s room were any match to the gun used to kill McKoy. A lady named Tonya Fields testified and said that the bullets police found in Bond’s room weren’t placed in the room until after the crime. The cartridges came from Bond’s uncle’s box of other items.

Additionally, one of the eyewitnesses who identified the killer told police they couldn’t 100% determine that Bond was the killer since it wasn’t bright at the crime scene.

Despite the wonky evidence, Bond was convicted. It took Marc Howard, the Prisons and Justice Initiative director, and Georgetown University undergraduate students Nada Eldaief, Cassidy Jensen and Julia Usiak to work on Bond’s case. They put Bond’s story in a 2018 10-minute documentary and made a website. Ultimately, they gifted him his freedom.

“The wheels of justice turn slowly,” Howard said. “Kenneth served 27 years, two months, and three days for a crime he didn’t commit. After looking into his case, I believed in his innocence and I believed in him. And while we’re still hoping to clear his name, I’m overjoyed that Kenneth is finally home where he belongs.”

Immediately after getting free, Bond made his first attempt at FaceTim to call his mom.

“I”m free, Ma! I’m free!” he told her.

Bond is a prime example of the Black community’s issues in a racist system. The National Registry of Exonerations reported that Black people are 7.5 “times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder in the U.S. than whites.”

The report read that 56% of the death-sentenced exonerees were African Americans, and 55% of Blacks were wrongfully convicted of murder and faced life imprisonment.

Watch Bond’s story below.