Memphis man proven innocent after 36 years behind bars
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MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) – Eric Wright has stood by his innocence since the day he was arrested in 1989.
The Tennessee Innocence Project reports that Wright was charged in the robbery and shooting of a convenience store clerk and her boyfriend in South Memphis.
When Eric was brought in as a potential suspect, a photo of him was shown in a lineup to the single eyewitness of the crime…but the TIP says the photo was two and a half years old, and shows Wright wearing a floral t-shirt similar to one worn by one of the boys at the scene.
The eyewitness’s positive ID of Eric landed him in prison with over a century long sentence, but he never stopped fighting for his freedom.
And in 2024, the Tennessee Innocence Project requested fingerprints from the scene be analyzed using the AFIS database.
It’s a resource that forensic expert & co-owner of SEP Forensic Consultants Samantha Spencer says “makes it possible to look through so much data and so many fingerprints that it provides you with way more information that you can then have a human look at and really point to, ‘hey, this is really a match here and I need to provide this information to law enforcement’.”
The results proved what Wright had known since he was put behind bars: he wasn’t at that crime scene 36 years ago. The fingerprints were linked to an alternative suspect, one that had no connection to Wright or his brother.
Wright is one of countless innocent people who have been exonerated thanks to recent developments in DNA and fingerprint technology. Because, though it was around in the late 90s and early 2000s, Spencer says “it wasn’t being widely used by police agencies and forensic crime labs.”
It’s also gotten so much more advanced.
“I mean, we can get a whole genome of someone’s DNA in a matter of days now,” Spencer says.
Now, Eric can look to a positive future. His attorney, Jessica Van Dyke, says she’s “incredibly excited to see what Eric does next with his freedom.”
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