This is good news.

North Carolina man exonerated after 17 years

Gregory Taylor was convicted in 1993 of killing a prostitute. A state innocence panel unanimously rules that he didn’t. It is the first exoneration by the only such agency in the U.S.

On Wednesday, Taylor was a free man, the first convicted felon in U.S. history to be exonerated by a state-mandated innocence commission.

A three-judge panel unanimously ruled that Taylor, 47, had been wrongly convicted in 1993 of murdering Jacquetta Thomas. The judges heard six days of testimony under a 2006 state law that created the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission to investigate claims of innocence by convicted felons.

Every state should have one of these commissions.