“I’m not gon’ to talk about being angry, I’m not gon’ talk about hate because it doesn’t change anything,” Daniels, who spent decades arguing he was innocent, said at a news conference Tuesday, Dec. 18. “But what I am gon’ talk about is the victims. There were a lot of victims in this issue. My family became victims, I became a victim and I pray that there are no more victims.” - Atlanta Black Star

Court documents report on January 15, 1980, a 15-year-old woman was raped after walking away from a gas station late at night in Wilmington, Delaware. After giving a description of the attacker, police officers showed her hundreds of photos, but the woman could not provide identification. Daniels’ appeared in the line-up because a witness to the assault "identified the suspect as someone named Elmer he knew from school where they had been in the same 8th grade homeroom class.” While confirmed by a teacher at the time, Daniels never attended school with the witness. - Delaware Online

During Daniel’s trial, an FBI agent testified hair samples found on both the alleged attacker and the victim could have come from each other. The state accepted this testimony, citing the agent’s claim that he never had a case where the hair samples didn’t match. This led to Daniel’s conviction.

In 2015, The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project started investigating flawed testimony in court cases dating back before 2000, launching reviews of Daniels’ case, among several others.