By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — A construction worker who spent four years in prison for allegedly raping a woman who later recanted her story was officially exonerated in Manhattan Supreme Court on Thursday.
William McCaffrey, 32, is a now a free man after being falsely convicted of rape in 2006 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
"I now retract what I said about you when i ordered you to prison for a 20-year term we all now know you never committed," Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Richard Carruthers said.
Biurny Peguero Gonzalez, 27, claimed she was raped at knife point in 2005 by three men, led by McCaffrey, in a car parked in the vicinity of Broadway and Dyckman, according to a brief filed by prosecutors.
The New Jersey mother confessed to the lie to a priest before telling authorities earlier this year. She said she made up the rape story as an alibi for having abandoned her friends after a night out with them uptown, prosecutors said.
Gonzalez identified McCaffrey in a police line-up and "collapsed toward the precinct floor in tears," when she concocted her story in 2005.
Her confession was corroborated when a recent DNA test of saliva from a bite mark she had at the time ruled out McCaffrey. Medical tests taken from Gonzalez in 2005 failed to show she was raped.
She pleaded guilty to two counts of perjury on Monday and faces up to seven years in pirson.
McCaffrey has been free on $5,000 bail since Aug. 31 while he awaited a ruling from the same judge who sentenced him originally.
Judge Carruthers expressed to McCaffrey his "personal regret for having participated in the injustice" against him.
