Raymond Gray was released from the Muskegon Correctional Facility on Tuesday, after serving more than 48 years for a murder he always insisted he didn’t
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When Raymond Felton Gray was sent to prison for life on a murder conviction nearly 50 years ago platform shoes were the fashion rage and Watergate scandal-plagued President Richard Nixon was still in office.
On Tuesday, Gray officially became a free man following a plea deal that allowed him to plead no contest to a lesser murder offense.
Gray, 69, has been incarcerated since May 1973 after he was convicted of first-degree murder for the slaying of a reputed Detroit drug dealer, Ruben Bryant, in a Detroit apartment months earlier.
Gray, who was hoping for an exoneration, has spent 48 years of his life behind Michigan prison walls. He has tried for years to appeal the conviction. He walked out of the Muskegon Correctional Facility Tuesday afternoon a free man.
click to enlarge Ray Gray walks out of prison a free man after 48 years behind bars. “It’s one of the happiest days of my life,” Gray said. “I feel blessed and grateful for the people who made this happen people of all races. Justice is often not only blind, but deaf, and you have to continue to touch it. People touched it and kept touching it, and now we’re here. … This time the system worked.” Ray and Barbara, who were married in a Saugatuck prison in 1985, shared a tearful embrace with their family Tuesday afternoon in the shadow of the penitentiary.