The City of Inglewood has agreed to pay $25 million to a 72-year-old man who spent nearly four decades in prison for a crime that he did not commit, making it what “appears to be California’s largest-ever wrongful conviction settlement,” attorneys said.
Maurice Hastings was convicted of the 1983 kidnapping and murder of an Inglewood woman and the attempted murder of both her husband and his friend.
After 38 years in prison, new DNA evidence exonerated and freed him in 2022 and led to the identification of a different suspect. Hastings was declared factually innocent by a California superior court in 2023.
Back in 1983, Roberta Wydermyer is said to have taken a late-night trip to a market in Inglewood but never returned home. Her husband and friend went out to look for her and located her car, which had been stolen. As they followed Roberta’s stolen car, the suspect shot at them, wounding her husband, Billy Ray Wydermyer…