Frank Sterling, a man who has served nearly two decades in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, could receive as much as $7.055 million in a settlement with Monroe County.

According to the Democrat & Chronicle, legislation passed by the Monroe County administration first recommended the settlement in April. The County Legislature reviewed the proposed settlement in its May 8 meeting. County Executive Maggie Brooks has requested $7.5 million in funding for the settlement from the Legislature.

“(The settlement) will allow Mr. Sterling to in some small measure enhance the enjoyment of the life that he has left after his 19 years wrongfully in custody,” Rochester lawyer Donald Thompson said.

Thompson, along with the New York City-based Innocence Project, an organization that uses DNA evidence to correct wrongful convictions, worked to secure Sterling’s freedom by proving his innocence.

In 1992, Sterling was convicted in the 1988 killing of Viola Manville, 74, of Hilton. In the year before his conviction, he confessed to Monroe County law enforcement. The confession was later proven to be a wrongful admission, as his account lacked key details surrounding the murder. He had made his confession after more than 12 hours of interrogation.

Shortly after Sterling made his confession, Hilton teenagers told authorities their classmate Mark Christie had been bragging about killing Manville, the Democrat & Chronicle reported. Authorities questioned Christie, but they and a judge ultimately determined he wasn’t the killer.

Later, mounting evidence against Christie — such as the fact that he had been absent from school the morning Manville was killed — along with details about how law enforcement handled the case and Christie’s eventual guilty plea would ignite questions over whether Sterling was really the killer.

Each year, as many as 10,000 people across the U.S. are wrongfully convicted of serious crimes. New York State has seen 29 exonerations since 1989, making it the third biggest state for overturning wrongful convictions through DNA testing in the country.

In Monroe County, there have been two other wrongful conviction settlements that preceded Sterling’s — his, however, is far larger than those. Sterling’s case is the only one in which police had evidence pointing to the real killer early on in their investigation.

In 2013, Gov. Andrew Cuomo pointed to the need for law enforcement reforms that would reduce the state’s number of wrongful convictions in his State of the State address. Cuomo urged for improvements in eyewitness identification procedures and called on law enforcement to begin videotaping interrogations, Newsday reports.

The fact that New York doesn’t require the aforementioned police practices reveals a discrepancy between the Empire State’s justice system and those of other states. New Jersey and Connecticut, for example, require their police to use an eyewitness identification system that has been proven to increase accuracy of eyewitness evidence. Twenty-one states have mandated that police interrogations in serious cases must be videotaped.

The Innocence Project has actually tried to get these reforms instated in New York for nearly a decade. However, each year Albany’s lawmakers delay such reforms, letting innocent individuals like Sterling languish in prison for crimes they didn’t commit while the real criminals remain free.