Two half-brothers who were wrongfully imprisoned have been awarded $75m (£53m) in damages.
The pair were acquitted as part of a North Carolina federal civil rights case, reports the Guardian, after being wrongfully charged for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in 1983 and imprisoned for 31 years.
The half-brothers, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, are set to receive a compensation of $31m (£21m) each as a result of their wrongful charge and imprisonment.
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This amounts to $1m (£700,000) for each year spent in jail - an amount that will likely not make up for their lost years.
Attorney Elliot Abrams said after the trial: "The first jury to hear all of the evidence - including the wrongly suppressed evidence - found Henry and Leon to be innocent."
He added that the jury 'found them to have been demonstrably and excruciatingly wronged, and has done what the law can do to make it right at this late date'.
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The two men were freed in 2014 when DNA evidence showed they were not guilty of the crime.
The results showed the crime was actually attached to an already convicted killer.
McCollum and Brown were teenagers at the time of their conviction, having spent a significant amount of their adulthood behind bars.
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According to reports, attorneys said the pair had low IQs when they were interrogated by police and were forced into confessing to crimes they did not commit.
McCollum was 19 at the time while Brown was 15 when they were both sentenced to death.
The former spent a significant amount of his life on death row while the latter had his sentence changed to life in prison as opposed to a death sentence.
On Friday (14 May), the judgment arrived against former SBI (State Bureau of Investigation) agents Leroy Allen and Kenneth Snead who were a part of the original investigation.
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Allen has since retired from the force and Snead died in 2019.
The lead defence attorney for the agents, Scott MacLatchie, tried to disparage the brothers' innocence, despite the fact they'd received full pardons - reportedly resulting in an angry questioning from Judge Terrence Boyle, according to the Fayetteville Observer.
"I've got my freedom," McCollum said. "There's still a lot of innocent people in prison today. And they don't deserve to be there."
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Words: Daisy Phillipson