A U.S. Navy veteran imprisoned in Mexico for more than 13 years for a crime he did not commit is now a free man after a judge overturned his conviction on Wednesday in the city of Acapulco.
Mr. Frisvold had been imprisoned for the 2010 killing of Natalya Sidorova, a Russian citizen married to American Jerry Schultz.
While Schultz and Sidorova were walking down a hall in their hotel, she was brutally attacked by an unknown male assailant, which stabbed her repeatedly and fled.
Court filings show that Schultz later identified Frisvold as the assailant.
Frisvold admitted to the crime during interrogation, then later said he was tortured and forced to sign a confession that he says was written for him.
Frisvold has since maintained his innocence but was stuck in prison for 13 years of complicated proceedings in a language he still doesn't understand.
That conviction was ultimately thrown out in 2019 by a state appeals court, which ruled that Frisvold's rights were violated during the trial. But instead of being released, the local prosecutor retried Frisvold, where a second government-employed criminologist testified in 2019 it could not be he in the surveillance footage of the grisly killing.
Still, the court proceedings stalled, with little movement and no decision in his case.
That finally changed with Wednesday's decision. A local judge found him not guilty and ordered his release.