Archie Williams spent 36 years in a Louisiana prison for a rape he didn’t commit.
“I watched ‘America’s Got Talent’ in prison and I would visualize myself there,” he said before his audition.
When a white woman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was raped and stabbed in 1982, she repeatedly identified Williams as her rapist.
Williams, then 22, said he was home asleep at the time of the assault, and his fingerprints weren’t found at the scene, but “as a poor black kid, [he] didn’t have the economic ability to fight the state of Louisiana,” he said in an interview before his performance.
The judges were stunned when Williams shared his story.
