Actor Exonerated in Wake of 23-Year Prison Sentence: JJ Velazquez Was Wrongly Convicted for Murder

Sing Sing actor Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez has been exonerated after serving 23 years for a crime he didn’t commit. According to Variety, the 48-year-old was officially cleared by the judge in a downtown Manhattan courtroom and emotionally celebrated with his friends and family once the word came down.

Velazquez co-stars with Colman Domingo in Sing Sing from A24. It tells the story of a group of inmates who grow through an interest in acting and theater productions. As Variety notes, the film featured formerly incarcerated actors at the titular prison, where the newly exonerated man was imprisoned.

“I was kidnapped by this country and enslaved,” Velazquez said to the press outside of the courthouse. “This is not a celebration. This is an indictment of the system.”

Velazquez was wrongfully convicted of murdering a retired New York police officer, earning a sentence of 25 years to life. His sentence was fishy from the start, with the actor having no resemblance to the suspect and having an alibi corroborated by phone records.

It took a series of Dateline investigations beginning in 2002 and ending a decade later with success in getting the case up for review. The conviction was upheld, however, and Velazquez spent nearly another decade in Sing Sing until receiving clemency from then-Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2021. His official time behind bars was 23 years, eight months, and seven days behind bars.

President Joe Biden would later offer an apology to Velazquez “on behalf of all society” for the wrongful imprisonment, but he was still held to parole rules to even go sit with Biden in the first place. The judge’s ruling now wipes the offense from his record entirely.

“It’s a lot deeper than discrimination. It comes down to diminishing a person’s human dignity. I’m getting a part of my dignity back,” he said. “There’s nothing that they can do to give me back the 24 years I lost, and all of the tribulations to incur as a result. There’s a spirit of vindication, but there’s still a lot of trauma that’s unaddressed – that the system refuses to address.”