When Wednesday rolls around to America, Jonathan Fleming will wake up a free time for the first time in two and a half decades.  He was imprisoned during that time for killing another man, even though he had ample documentation and witnesses placing him in Florida at the time of the crime.

“I’m going to go eat dinner with my mother and my family, and I'm going to live the rest of my life,” the 51-year old Fleming said leaving the courthouse in Brooklyn, New York City.

Fleming had told cops and prosecutors from the very start he had been at Disney World in Florida when Darryl Rush was killed in Brooklyn in 1989.  He had plane tickets, videos and postcards from his trip, but prosecutors at the time suggested he could have made a quick round-trip plane trip to return to New York. 

But Fleming also had a hotel receipt from Orlando, Florida showing that he had paid just a few hours before the shooting more than 1,700 kilometers away.  During the investigation, Orlando police provided a letter stating that employees at the hotel remembered him.

Neither the receipt nor the police letter had been provided to Fleming's first defense lawyer, in violation of US court’s “discovery” rules.  The items were time stamped, meaning police and prosecutors had seen them, but locked them away in a file for decades.

“As you can imagine, after sitting in jail for 25 years for a crime he didn’t commit, he can't help but feel vindicated,” said one of Fleming's lawyers, Anthony Mayol.  “On the flip side, that's 25 years that have been stolen, that he’ll never get back.”

“He has no job, no career, no prospects,” said his other attorney Taylor Koss.  But on the bright said, “We’re suing everybody, let's be honest.”