After decades, prosecutors finally listened to a rape survivor and started a process that freed a wrongfully convicted man, in a case originally handled by a New Orleans DA’s office with a long history of allegedly suppressing evidence to win convictions.

Patrick Brown walked out of prison May 8 after the current Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office asked a judge to vacate his aggravated rape conviction. The prosecutor told the court that Brown, 49, languished 29 years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.

“When someone is wrongfully convicted, not only is it an injustice for the person who has years of their life stolen, but it is an injustice for the victim and the people of New Orleans because the real perpetrator is left to harm others,” District Attorney Jason Williams, who took office in 2021, said in a statement.

In 1994, a jury convicted Brown of raping his then 6-year-old stepdaughter. The case was prosecuted under former Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., who served from 1973 to 2003.

Williams’ stepdaughter didn’t testify during the trial. NOLA.com reports that she had a nose bleed on the witness stand and was removed before she could testify that another family member raped her. Instead, the jury heard hearsay testimony and sketchy medical evidence.

But a later review of the case uncovered handwritten notes in the DA’s files showing that prosecutors knew that another family member confessed to the rape, according to NOLA.com.

Over the decades, the rape survivor, now an adult, told the prosecutor that her stepfather was innocent. At the May 8 hearing, the woman told the judge that she had written more than 100 letters to prosecutors and court officials but was ignored until Williams became district attorney

Williams’ office said it launched an investigation – which wasn’t done by previous prosecutors – under its civil rights division.

“Listening and engaging victims and survivors of sexual assault is a top priority in this office,” Williams said. “It is incredibly disheartening to know that this woman was dismissed and ignored, no matter how inconvenient her truth, when all she wanted was the real offender to be held responsible.”

Judge Calvin Johnson signed an order to release Brown, unleashing an avalanche of emotions in the courtroom.

The rape survivor fell to her knees after Johnson signed the order. She and Brown embraced, as he whispered an apology to her.

“I was telling her I’m sorry it happened to her. I was telling her I failed as a father. I was supposed to protect my household and I didn’t,” Brown told NOLA.com.

Before signing the release, Johnson said the state was complicit in the “horror” Brown’s stepdaughter endured, adding, “That’s a wrong that all of us — all of us — are guilty of,” according to NOLA.com.

Indeed, Orleans Parish once topped the list of highest per-capita rate of wrongful convictions with 9.33, followed by Suffolk County, Mass., at a distant second place with 5.71, according to data analyzed through May 2015 by the University of Michigan Law School's National Registry of Exonerations.

A separate analysis by Innocence Project New Orleans found that Connick’s office “regularly suppressed crucial evidence in cases, costing taxpayers millions of dollars, sending innocent men to prison and exacerbating the crime problem in New Orleans.”

His office withheld favorable evidence from defense attorneys in nine of the 36 (25 percent) cases of men sentenced to death during Connick’s tenure. Four of those men were eventually exonerated.