CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Cleveland man who spent more than 15 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit walked out of jail Thursday afternoon and embraced his mother and two daughters.

"My baby's home," Christopher Miller's crying mother, Rita Miller, shouted from her only son's arms.

Miller, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2002, was released Thursday after a judge found that DNA evidence cleared him of raping a woman during a gunpoint robbery inside her Cleveland Heights apartment building.

"I did everything I possibly could to prove to them it wasn't me," Miller said during a news conference after his release. "They weren't trying to hear that. They wanted a conviction."

At a Thursday afternoon hearing, Common Pleas Judge Hollie Gallagher vacated Miller's conviction for rape, aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, intimidation with a firearm and other charges, and prosecutors dismissed the charges, ensuring his release from jail.

But Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O'Malley's office maintains that investigators cannot say for sure that Miller wasn't somehow involved in the crime, because he was arrested the next morning in possession of the victim's cellphone and she maintains that she saw Miller at the onset of the attack.

Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Anthony Miranda dismissed the charges against Miller in a way that gives the office the right to refile charges of robbery and burglary after further investigation.

"We do not agree that Mr. Miller has established actual innocence of all charges," Miranda said.

Brian Howe, a staff attorney with the Ohio Innocence Project, dismissed the idea that Miller was involved.

"The evidence is 100 percent unambiguous," Howe said.

The victim said two men forced her into her Euclid Heights Boulevard apartment at gunpoint about midnight, raped her and stole her purse. Her cellphone was inside the purse and Cleveland Heights police detectives began tracking it. About eight hours later, calls were made on the phone, and detectives tracked the phone to Miller.

Miller told police he bought the phone from a stranger in exchange for drugs, and denied involvement in the crime.

The woman picked Miller's picture out of a photo lineup after his arrest and identified him as the man who pressed the gun against her neck, tore off her clothes, covered her face with a towel and raped her.

DNA tests of material in a rape kit at the time of trial found only one contributor, who was not Miller. He was nonetheless convicted of rape, aggravated burglary and a host of other charges and sentenced to 33 years in prison.

Two years later, police got a match for the DNA in the kit to a Richard Stadmire after Stadmire was convicted of a similar rape in Mayfield Heights a few weeks after the Cleveland Heights rape.

Miller has always maintained his innocence. The Ohio Innocence Project took up his case in 2015 and prosecutors agreed to re-test the DNA in 2017.

Those test results showed that DNA from a second man, Charles Boyd, was also present in the rape kit. Boyd, who testified as part of a plea deal in Stadmire's trial that he acted as a lookout for Stadmire and Miller in the Cleveland Heights attack, was indicted Thursday on charges of rape, aggravated burglary, aggravated robbery and perjury.

Boyd is currently being held in the Cleveland Heights jail on a $50,000 bond.

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