On February 2, 2004, Stephan Cowans became the 141st person in the United States to be exonerated as a result of postconviction DNA testing. On January 23, 2004, having proclaimed his innocence for over six and a half years, Cowans walked out of the Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, Massachusetts. He was officially exonerated at a hearing on February 2, 2004.

On May 30, 1997, an officer of the Boston Police Department was shot twice with his own service weapon in the backyard of a house in Jamaica Plain following a short struggle with an unknown assailant. The assailant fired an additional shot at an individual who was standing in the window of a second floor bedroom. The assailant ran from the scene, leaving the baseball hat he was wearing. He forcibly entered a nearby home, where he stopped to drink from a glass of water. The assailant then fled, leaving both the gun and the sweatshirt he had been wearing.

Approximately two weeks later, the injured police officer identified Stephan Cowans from a photo array composed of eight photographs. On July 2, 1997, the officer attended a lineup and once again singled out Cowans as the man who had shot him. On that same day the individual who had been watching from his second floor bedroom window also identified Cowans as the assailant.

Source: Innocence Project