TAMPA, Fla. — The Tampa City Council has voted to authorize a $14 million lawsuit settlement to a wrongfully convicted man Thursday afternoon.

Robert DuBoise was falsely convicted of a 1983 rape and murder of a Tampa woman.

He spent 37 years in prison.

DuBoise was 18 years old when convicted for the murder and attempted rape of Barbara Grams.

He is now 59.

The only piece of evidence prosecutors had to send him to prison was a bite mark on the victim’s body, a method that experts have since discredited. 

Grams was a 19-year-old Tampa woman who was walking home from her job at Tampa Bay Center, the shopping mall that was at the site of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ current training facility on MLK Boulevard.

Her sexually assaulted and beaten body was found a day later behind an office on North Boulevard.

In 2018, the Innocence Project took up the DuBoise case and helped get him exonerated in 2020.

Later, DNA cleared DuBoise and identified two other men, Amos Robinson and Abron Scott, as Gram’s killers. Both Robinson and Scott are already serving life sentences for other murders committed after Grams was killed.

In 2021, DuBoise sued forensic dentist Richard Souviron, who testified in the case, a police detective and the City of Tampa.

Last year, state legislators and Gov. Ron DeSantis approved a bill that awarded DuBoise $1.85 million, roughly $50,000 for each year of his wrongful incarceration.