A man from Upstate New York was awarded over $41 million, which is believed to be the largest sum from a lawsuit in U.S. history, by a federal jury who found that he was wrongly convicted of rape.

Jeff Deskovic of Putnam County was charged with the 1989 rape and death of a high school student when he was 16 years old. He says that he was coerced into a false confession during a six-hour interrogation about the murder of his 15-year-old classmate Angela Correa.

Deskovic was then convicted in 1991 after prosecutors successfully argued that he was guilty, despite the fact that his DNA was not found in semen taken from the body.

Deskovic served over a decade in prison before he was eventually exonerated in 2006 after another suspect, Steven Cunningham, confessed to the crime and his DNA proved to be a match.

On Thursday, he won $41,650,000 in a lawsuit against Putnam County and former Putnam Sheriff's Investigator Daniel Stephens, who the court ruled fabricated evidence and coerced his false confession.

Both defense lawyers and prosecutors believe this is the largest jury award ever in a wrongful conviction case.

"I feel elated. The jury obviously saw that Daniel Stephens' testimony was not truthful," said Deskovic, 40, according to Lohud news. "I feel like I finally got the fair trial I never got before."

According to the Associated Press, Deskovic will receive only $10 million of the award due to the terms and conditions of a pretrial settlement that limited damages.

Earlier this year, the five New York men wrongly convicted of brutally beating and raping a female jogger in Central Park in 1989 agreed to settle their lawsuit against New York City for $40 million.

The city agreed to the hefty settlement in June in order to resolve the lengthy civil rights suit over the wrongful arrests and imprisonment of the then-teenage boys, The New York Times reported.

The boys, between 14 and 16 years old at the time, were convicted in 1990 and spent between five and 13 years in prison. They became infamous as the "Central Park Five."