A man wrongly convicted of raping a Westchester County teenage girl nearly five decades ago was finally exonerated Tuesday in an emotional hearing where he shared a hug with the presiding judge.

In what the Innocence Project has called the longest wrongful conviction in American history to be overturned by new DNA evidence, Leonard Mack, now a South Carolina resident, received the gift of exoneration on his 72nd birthday.

State Supreme Court Judge Anne E. Minihan overturned Mack’s 1976 conviction that left him languishing in prison for more than seven years. He was previously found guilty of raping one teen girl and trying to rape another.

But advanced DNA testing proved Mack was not behind the attacks, and instead pointed to a sex offender who recently confessed to the disturbing crimes, the Westchester District Attorney’s Office said.

Mack, a Vietnam War veteran, was originally on authorities’ radar when two high school students were forced at gunpoint into the woods in the town of Greenburgh on May 23, 1975, the district attorney’s office said.

The two girls were tied up, blinded and gagged before their attacker raped one of them twice and tried to sexually assault the other victim, prosecutors said.

Mack was arrested hours after the crime because he fit the suspect description of a black man with an earring and hat, the DA’s office said.

Despite presenting alibi witnesses at trial, he was found guilty by a jury of first-degree rape and criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree.

Mack, who is now married, tried behind bars to challenge his conviction multiple times in the 1980s, but the effort was opposed by the Westchester DA’s office and rejected by the courts.

“Today has been a long time coming. I lost seven-and-a-half years of my life in prison for a crime I did not commit and I have lived with this injustice hanging over my head for almost 50 years,” Mack said in a press release from the Innocence Project that contacted the DA’s office in November 2022.

“It changed the course of my life — everything from where I lived to my relationship with my family. I never lost hope that one day that I would be proven innocent. Now the truth has come to light and I can finally breathe. I am finally free.”

Minihan, the judge, told him it was the honor of her career to vacate his conviction, according to The Journal News.

“This is your day. You’ve waited much too long for it,” she reportedly told him. “In what we do the stakes are very high and it’s important to get it right.”

The judge left her seat on the bench to give him a hug during the emotional hearing, according to a photo from the Innocence Project.

Other images showed Mack wipe tears away in court and raise his hand as he walked out of the government building.

The man who confessed to the rape was not identified by prosecutors. He could not be charged because the statute of limitations had run out on the old case.

He was previously linked to a 1975 rape in Queens – just two weeks after the Greenburgh rape – and another 2004 sex crime in the Westchester town, the DA’s office said. He’s in custody and is being prosecuted for failing to register as a sex offender connected to the 2004 crime, prosecutors said.