New York: A New York man’s conviction was cleared after he spent more than a quarter-century behind bars for a deadly robbery, with prosecutors acknowledging witnesses against him – including a 10-year-old boy – weren’t reliable.

Jaythan Kendrick, 62, walked out of a Queens courthouse Thursday, free for the first time since his arrest in the November 1994 death of Josephine Sanchez, a 70-year-old woman who was stabbed twice in the back.

‘I´m very, very happy today because I never thought this would happen, although I hoped and wished that it would,’ Kendrick, 62, told the court.

‘I´ve just known one thing for the last 25 years: I did not commit this crime,’ he said. ‘Nobody really understands what it is to be in prison when you are innocent, and you know you´re innocent, and you´re behind that wall.’

Queens Justice Joseph Zayas apologized to Kendrick for what he called a ‘monumental’ miscarriage of justice.

‘It took way, way too long to discover, and you, sir, deserve better than that,’ the judge said as he overturned Kendrick’s murder conviction and dismissed the case. ‘We failed you.’

Kendrick, an Army veteran and former postal carrier who is also known legally as Ernest Kendrick, had been serving a sentence of 25 years to life after being convicted of fatally stabbing Sanchez in 1995 at the Ravenswood Houses in Queens.

His conviction rested mainly on the testimony of the 10-year-old – who had looked out at the crime scene from a third-floor window and identified Kendrick as the man he saw running away – and a second witness, a man who said he saw Kendrick running past him with a purse.

A black handbag was later found by police while searching Kendrick’s apartment, which he was sharing with a woman at the time, the New York Post reported.

But recent DNA testing – which wasn’t done at the time of the trial – showed there was none of the victim’s DNA on the purse, contradicting the idea that the bag belonged to her. Tests also found another man’s DNA, not Kendrick’s, under Sanchez’s fingernails.

The now-grown child witness, who had initially picked someone else out of a lineup, recanted his later identification of Kendrick in recent years. He admitted that he wasn’t able to see the suspect clearly enough to identify him at the time of the incident.

Kendrick’s lawyers raised doubts about the veracity of the second witness, noting that the witness had two pending criminal cases and incentive to give police the testimony they needed to arrest Kendrick, Freidman said.

Additionally, four other witnesses have since emerged with accounts that conflicted with the second witnesses’ testimony.

‘This is a textbook case of wrongful conviction exposing the worst flaws in our system,’ said Susan Friedman, Kendrick’s lawyer with the Innocence Project, which worked on his case with the WilmerHale law firm.

Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said prosecutors now believe jurors would probably have acquitted Kendrick if they had heard all the evidence that’s now available.

In one of her first moves when she took office this past January, Katz created a Conviction Integrity Unit to review wrongful-conviction claims, and Kendrick’s soon became one of them.

‘This case is a prime example of why the CIU exists,’ she said in a statement Thursday.

Katz’s predecessor, Queens DA Richard Brown, had refused to consider the new evidence and insisted on Kendrick’s guilt. Brown died in 2019.

‘Too many police and prosecutors remain focused on securing and maintaining convictions at all costs,’ WilmerHale attorney Ross Firsenbaum said, while praising Katz’s office, according to the New York Post.

Firsenbaum donated his time to the Innocence Project to work on Kendrick’s wrongful conviction case.

Kendrick’s cousin, Clarence Hughes, spent the past 25 years advocating for Kendrick’s innocence, writing to the FBI, the Queens DA and ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show.’

‘The family is elated … Jaythan lost a lot of his family,’ Hughes said.

Hughes said that Kendrick’s mother and sister died while he was incarcerated, adding that ‘We don’t have that many of the family left.’

Kendrick told reporters that he was looking forward to a good meal now that he’s free – ‘Shrimp, flounder, lobster, crab, any of that’ – and said he’s looking forward to traveling and catching up on technology and other things he’s missed in prison.

‘As I was told, there´s a whole new world out there,’ he told reporters. ‘OK, let’s go.’

Kendrick’s advice to anyone who might find themselves in a similar situation as he was in, back in 1994, was: ‘I would tell them to ask for a lawyer, don’t say one word.’

He added that, ‘I trusted them, I trusted the police, I trusted they’d do the right thing and see that I was innocent. That was my mistake.’