Netflix released The Innocent Man, a six-part documentary series based on the book, in December 2018. Ron Williamson has returned to his hometown of Ada, Oklahoma, after multiple failed attempts to play for various minor league baseball teams, including the Fort Lauderdale Yankees and two affiliate teams owned by the Oakland Athletics.
Carl Allen, Ada’s assistant police chief from 1985 to 2011, also appears in The Innocent Man and asserts that the police officers involved in both cases did not “get together and decide to wrongly convict people on purpose.” “I don’t believe they are capable of putting innocent people in jail,” he says.
His clients are people on death row — abused and neglected children who were prosecuted as adults and placed in adult prisons where they were beaten and sexually abused, and mentally disabled people whose illnesses helped land them in prison where their special needs were unmet.
Ultimately, Williamson was sentenced to death and Fritz was sentenced to life in prison without parole. About 11 years later, DNA tests concluded that the hair samples did not match either Williamson or Fritz. An evaluation of semen samples also suggested that the men had not raped Carter.
. The book tells the story of Ronald 'Ron' Keith Williamson of Ada, Oklahoma, a former minor league baseball player who was wrongly convicted in 1988 of the rape and murder of Debra Sue Carter in Ada and was sentenced to death.
Since a death penalty conviction automatically sets in motion a series of appeals, the Innocence Project aided Williamson's attorney, Mark Barrett, in exposing several glaring holes in the prosecution's case and ...
A shoulder injury inhibited his chances to progress. His big dreams were not enough to overcome the odds (less than 10 percent) of making it to a big league game. His failures led to, or aggravated, his depression and problem drinking.
After serving 11 years on death row, he was exonerated by DNA evidence and other material introduced by the Innocence Project and was released in 1999. Netflix released The Innocent Man, a six-part documentary series based on the book, in December 2018.
Frank H. Seay, a U.S. District Court judge, ordered a retrial. After suffering through a conviction and eleven years on death row, Williamson and Fritz were exonerated by DNA evidence and released on April 15, 1999. Williamson was the 78th inmate released from death row since 1973.
At one time, all the men were incarcerated on the same death row. About two decades before Grisham's book, Ward and Fontenot's wrongful convictions were detailed in the book The Dreams of Ada (1987) by Robert Mayer.
Another man from Ada, Glen Gore, was eventually convicted of the original crime on June 24, 2003. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was overturned in August 2005. He was convicted at a second trial on June 21, 2006, and sentenced by Judge Landrith to life in prison without parole. This was required by law due to a jury deadlock on ...
Grisham, who executive-produced The Innocent Man and appears throughout the series, says the events in the story would be unbelievable if he’d written them in a novel because it’s hard to imagine an entire justice system breaking down as it did in these cases.
Five years after Carter’s murder, authorities pursued Ron Williamson and his best friend Dennis Fritz in the case. Both men were well-known around Ada, particularly Williamson, who had left town with dreams of becoming a baseball star and returned after a series of injuries put those plans to rest.
She was not killed in a stabbing, but rather died of a single gunshot wound to the head.
The body of 21-year-old Debbie Sue Carter was found in her apartment in Ada in December 1982. She had been raped, murdered and left with words written on her body in ketchup.
Both men were initially questioned early in the investigation and let go due to a lack of physical evidence.
The Netflix series provides updates to both cases with a deep dive that reveals startling similarities between the way both murder investigations were prosecuted, including using evidence based on coerced confessions, murky retellings of dreams and the testimony of a prison informant.
According Ward’s account, they burned Haraway’s body in a shack.
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Stevenson Defends McMillian. The film Just Mercy, based on Bryan Stevenson ’s book of the same name, focuses on his tireless pursuit of the truth in McMillian’s case, and that begins with the testimony of Ralph Myers. Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson got Walter McMillian’s murder conviction overturned in 1993, ...
Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson got Walter McMillian’s murder conviction overturned in 1993 , after McMillian spent six years on death row. With no leads on who killed the white woman in Monroeville, police saw an opportunity with Myers after they arrested him on suspicion of another murder.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative, Alabama judges have overridden jury verdicts 112 times since 1976 (the state officially abolished the practice in 2017). McMillian filed an appeal, but a higher court affirmed his death sentence in 1991. And that’s when Bryan Stevenson stepped in.
Bryan Stevenson gave a TED talk in 2012 about the systemic racism of America’s criminal justice system. His father, born and raised in southern Delaware, took the racial slights in stride, but Stevenson’s mother, a Philadelphia native, fought back.
With Stevenson at its helm, the Equal Justice Initiative has won more than 135 reversals, relief, or release from prison for people on death row, as well as relief for hundreds of other wrongfully convicted or unfairly sentenced people.
She had been shot three times. Local police spent months investigating many different suspects for the killing, but none of their leads panned out.
But as much as his family fought against the system, the system had a way of taking hold. Stevenson’s uncle died in prison, and when he was 16, robbers stabbed his 86-year-old grandfather to death in his own home. The perpetrators received life prison sentences.
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. Atlanta newlyweds Roy and Celestial are ready to take on the world, but when Roy is convicted of a crime he did not commit, their union is jolted. What I admired most was Jones’s focus on the intimate details of what injustice does to people who love each other.
One of the most common causes of wrongful convictions is faulty eyewitness testimony. But that knowledge doesn’t tell us why or how someone could make such a major mistake. In Atonement, however, we get to go inside the mind of a 13-year-old girl whose misidentification destroys lives.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. In 1815, sailor Edmond Dantès is about to marry his love when three friends falsely accuse him of treason. He is imprisoned for more than a decade and when he escapes exacts all kinds of spectacular revenge.
In 1984, 22-year-old North Carolina college student Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint. In a lineup and later in court, she identified Ronald Cotton as her assailant, and he was convicted. But she picked the wrong man; after 11 years behind bars, Cotton took a DNA test that proved his innocence.
Stevenson is now one of America’s leading voices on poverty, inequality and racial injustice, but in the early 1980s, he was a law student with no vision for his future.