Skip Ad Ad Loading... x Embed x Share After new DNA evidence cleared him of the crimes and linked them to the notorious "teardrop rapist" Los Angeles judge on Monday overturned the conviction of a man who spent 16 years in prison for sexual assault and other charges. USA TODAY 
 
 Luis Vargas, who has been in prison for 16 years, reacts in court as he is exonerated Monday, Nov. 23, in Los Angeles. A judge exonerated Vargas, convicted of three rapes, after DNA evidence linked the crimes to a serial rapist wanted for assaults dating back two decades. (Photo: AP) 
 
 A California man who spent 16 years behind bars for sexual assault convictions was cleared on Monday after DNA evidence linked the crimes to another man. 
 
 Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Ryan exonerated Luis Vargas after DNA evidence linked the crimes to the so-called “teardrop rapist,” who is suspected of more than 30 rapes in the Los Angeles area since 1996 and has never been identified, AP reported. 
 
 The teardrop rapist gained his nickname for a teardrop tattoo under his eye. The rapist was known for grabbing his victims and threatening them with a weapon before pulling them into a secluded area and raping them, the Los Angeles Times reported. 
 
 Vargas, lived near the area where several assaults took place and was misidentified as the rapist because of a similar teardrop tattoo, according to the Times. 
 
 In 1999, he was sentenced to 55 years in prison for three sexual assaults, but as he sat behind bars the rapes continued, the Times reported. 
 
 Vargas, who has maintained his innocence, reached out to lawyers and students at the California Innocence Project at California Western School of Law. He told them he believed the teardrop rapist committed the assaults of which he was convicted, according to AP. The group took up Vargas’ case in 2012. 
 
 After his name was cleared, Vargas, 46, was taken back into custody because his green card was revoked when he was convicted of the crimes, AP reported. 
 
 His lawyers told his family they believed Vargas will be free to go home soon. 
 
 This December, 2013 photo provided by the California Innocence Project shows Luis Vargas, center, with his daughter Crystal Vargas and son Daniel Vargas at his community college graduation ceremony held within the walls of a California state prison in Blythe, Calif. (Photo: AP) 
 
 His daughter, Cristal Nora Vargas, told KABC-TV, she is ready to help her father take back his life. 
 
 "This is all I've ever wanted, and I thank God for this one because God knows the truth behind all of this," she told KABC. "It's a relief because I believed in my father's innocence the day he told me he was innocent. Growing up, I would cry myself to sleep. My father meant the world to me, and he still does." 
 
 Follow @MaryBowerman on Twitter. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1Hk46Mn ||||| On November 23, 2015, Judge William Ryan of the Los Angeles Superior Court exonerated Luis Vargas after 16 years of wrongful incarceration. 
 
 On December 7, 1999, just before being sentenced for three crimes he did not commit, Luis Vargas addressed the Los Angeles Superior Court. 
 
 Vargas stated, “…I will pray for God’s mercy on all of you…but as far as I’m concerned, as far as I’m concerned [the] individual [who] really did these crimes might really be raping someone out there, might really be killing someone out there.” 
 
 The judge then handed Luis a sentence of fifty-five years to life. 
 
 Unfortunately for Luis and the people of Los Angeles, Luis was right. 
 
 Unbeknownst to the public at the time, a methodical serial rapist known only as the “Tear Drop Rapist” was committing eerily similar crimes. Sadly, it would take almost fifteen years, dozens of sexual assaults, and many advances in DNA science for anyone to see Luis was speaking the truth on December 7, 1999. 
 
 Luis Vargas’s case originally caught the attention of the California Innocence Project (CIP) staff in 2011. His case was riddled with textbook post-conviction red flags. The most prominent red flag of all: eyewitness misidentification. In fact, the prosecution’s entire case relied on the wavering identifications of three traumatized young ladies. Vargas was convicted solely on the victims’ accounts of the savage attacks. Furthermore, the prosecution was beyond adamant the same person committed all three of the assaults. Perhaps one of the most disturbing legal issues in Vargas’s story is that, despite the prosecution’s weak, one dimensional case, the defense chose not to proffer an eyewitness identification expert. 
 
 Vargas wrote a letter to CIP and included an article from the L.A. Times, chronicling the sadistic serial rape spree of the Tear Drop Rapist. The Tear Drop Rapist was described as a middle aged, small build, Hispanic male. The Tear Drop Rapist was given his moniker due to the fact that he was often described by his victims as having one or two teardrop tattoos under his eye. This was eerily the same description given by the three victims in the Vargas case. In contrast, Vargas had one faded, barely visible teardrop tattoo that he received as a homeless thirteen-year-old youth. 
 
 The Tear Drop Rapist committed over 30 attacks in the last decade, all within a 1.6 mile radius of the three attacks in the Vargas case. As if these facts were not enough, CIP noticed that reading the FBI’s published description of the Tear Drop Rapist’s modus operandi (see here) was like reading a carbon copy of the District Attorney’s 1999 closing argument. 
 
 In 2013, CIP decided to test the only remaining physical evidence available in Vargas’s case: the rape kit and clothing from one of the victims. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s office agreed to test the requested items. CIP filed a California Penal Code Section 1405 motion for post- conviction DNA testing. The DNA test results revealed Vargas did not commit the rape, but the Tear Drop Rapist did. 
 
 The Tear Drop Rapist is attributed to having committed 35 attacks; not including the three attacks for which Vargas was convicted. 
 
 On November 23, 2015, Luis Vargas was exonerated of all three sexual assaults. Through cooperation with the district attorney’s office, Judge Ryan of the Los Angeles Superior Court threw out the convictions against Vargas. Vargas is the California Innocence Project’s 3rd DNA exoneration and 20th freed client overall. ||||| Jurors convicted him, and he was sentenced to 55 years to life in prison. 
 
 
 
 As the attacks by the teardrop rapist continued, Vargas fought for his release from behind bars. He filed appeal after appeal and unsuccessfully petitioned the state Supreme Court to look at his case. In December 2012, aided by the California Innocence Project, he filed a request to examine DNA collected from the jean shorts and underwear of one of the victims he was convicted of attacking, according to court documents. 
 
 
 
 The tests found genetic material from at least two people, including the victim and the teardrop rapist, Vargas' lawyers said. 
 
 
 
 In the recent letter to the court, the district attorney's office said the sophisticated technology used to exclude Vargas' DNA did not exist back in the late-1990s. 
 
 
 
 The office said the victims who positively identified him at trial hadn't been as certain of their identifications during earlier lineups. And prosecutors also noted a discrepancy in the victims' descriptions: Two victims said their attacker had two teardrops tattooed near his left eye. Vargas has only one. 
 
 
 
 The girl who was raped, now a woman, stood by her identification of Vargas when she was recently interviewed by investigators. Prosecutors said they believe she "honestly but mistakenly identified Vargas at trial as her assailant." 
 
 
 
 A D.A. spokeswoman said the office did a "very careful, extensive review, because there was only DNA from one victim," before deciding to approve of Vargas' release. 
 
 
 
 At the hearing Monday, Superior Court Judge William C. Ryan ordered Vargas' immediate release but noted that he first would be transferred to federal custody. There is an immigration hold on him, Vargas' attorneys said, because their client, who was born in Mexico, was a legal resident at the time of his arrest. They said they were hopeful he would be released soon. 
 
 
 
 Vargas' 26-year-old daughter, Crystal Nuñez-Vargas, said she felt a weight lift from her shoulders inside the courtroom Monday. 
 
 
 
 She told reporters after the hearing that her father's imprisonment had wrecked her life. She often cried herself to sleep and felt as if she'd been robbed of the sense of protection and security that might come with a father. She dreaded birthdays and cried before her quinceañera, knowing he wouldn't be there for a father-daughter dance. 
 
 
 
 She got married recently, Nuñez-Vargas said, but only on paper. She's holding off on a big church celebration until after her father's release. She wants him to walk her down the aisle. 
 
 
 
 "Every little girl's dream," she said, choking up. 
 
 
 
 Her dad's wish for after his release, she said, is simple: He wants to read bedtime stories to her 7-year-old daughter. 
 
 
 
 Nuñez-Vargas peeked down at her daughter, who was smiling and clinging to her thigh. 
 
 
 
 Her little girl, Nuñez-Vargas realized, is about as old as she had been when her father was arrested. 
 
 
 
 Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.
– A California man imprisoned for 16 years for sexual assault was exonerated Monday after DNA tests showed another man committed the crimes, USA Today reports. Luis Vargas, 46, broke down when an LA Superior Court judge granted a petition to release him from his sentence of 55 years to life for three sex crimes. The move came after DNA evidence linked those assaults to a serial attacker known as the Teardrop Rapist, so labeled for having a teardrop tattoo under his eye, the AP notes. That man, who was never caught, is suspected of having committed about three dozen crimes in the LA area. Vargas had matched assailant descriptions, and he caught investigators' eye because he had a faded teardrop tattoo under his left eye and a 1992 rape conviction involving his girlfriend at the time, reports the Los Angeles Times. "You can sentence me to all the years you want, but ... that individual that really did these crimes might really be raping someone out there," Vargas warned a judge before he was sentenced in 1999. In 2012, Vargas reached out to the California Innocence Project and asked to use DNA techniques to examine samples on the clothing of one of his alleged victims, per the Times. The DNA matched that of the victim and the Teardrop Rapist. The three victims had positively IDed Vargas as the perpetrator, but an Innocence Project attorney tells the AP it was a "shaky witness" case, an assertion the LA district attorney's office backed up in a recent court letter that said there were discrepancies and uncertainties in their identification of the rapist, the Times notes. Vargas still has to clear up some immigration issues before he's fully released, but he hopes to be home by Christmas.