A thick, clean scar runs the length of Ricky Webb’s torso, a silent, permanent reminder of the injustices he suffered at the hand of the State of Tennessee.

He spent 45 years and 11 months in its prisons for a murder and rape he did not commit, the longest-serving exoneree on record in state history, the fourth-longest in the nation.

Counting his time in jail before his trial, Webb was incarcerated nearly 47 years.

Man sues City of Memphis for wrongful conviction

“I didn’t understand why it seemed like nobody wanted to hear the truth,” Webb, 70, said early this month, retelling the details of nearly five decades that are so fresh in his memory, he barely pauses as he recounts them.

“I kept looking up at the judge — and thinking, ‘In God we trust,’” he said.

Webb, now back living in Humboldt, Tennessee, was released on bond in early October and finally was set free several weeks later after lawyers at the Tennessee Innocence Project spent more than two years proving he was wrongly convicted. 

Among other things, it found that the TBI coerced a key witness to change her story, telling her she would lose her children if she did not cooperate, said Connor Webber, 29, lead attorney in the exoneration,

After a three-day trial in Gibson County in 1978, an all-white jury found Webb guilty of the rape and murder of Charlotte Webb, a 29-year-old wife and mother found shot to death in the bedroom of her family’s home in Gibson, about 100 miles northeast of Memphis.