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This is the emotional moment a man who was wrongly imprisoned for nearly four decades for murder met and forgave the young witness whose false testimony put him behind bars. Ricky Jackson, 57, was exonerated in November after spending a staggering 39 years in prison for a crime he did not commit - the robbing and shooting murder of a money-order salesman in 1975. His conviction at the age of 18 - which led to him being placed on death row, with his sentence later commuted to life - was largely based on the testimony of a 12-year-old boy named Edward Vernon. At the time, Vernon claimed under oath that he saw Jackson pull the trigger - even though he was actually several blocks away on a school bus. But in 2013, he went back on his testimony.