The warden said he had a duty to carry out, and he read from a piece of paper: You have been sentenced to die by lethal injection, and such sentence will be carried out at 12:30 a.m., the 24th of September, 1994. The prison had received no stay of execution, the warden said, so Williamson would be brought to the holding area next to the death chamber until the 24th.
He was led back to a cell, screaming from that moment on, night and day, even after they moved him into another unit with double doors to muffle the noise. On Sept. 17, Williamson was shifted into the special cell for prisoners with less than a week to live. By then, the screaming had torn his throat to ribbons, but everyone knew his raspy, desperate litany: “I did not rape or kill Debra Sue Carter! I am an innocent man!” In Norman, Okla., a public defender named Janet Chesley frantically scrambled a team to move the case into federal court, assembling a mass of papers and fresh arguments. With just five days to go, they won a stay.
One year later, U.S. district court Judge Frank Seay would rule that Williamson’s trial had been a constitutional shambles. His conviction and death sentence–ratified by every state court in Oklahoma–had been plagued by unreliable informants, prosecutorial misconduct, an inept defense lawyer, bogus scientific evidence and a witness who himself was a likely suspect, the federal judge said. He vacated the conviction.
Last April, before Williamson could be tried again, DNA tests arranged by the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York proved that he was actually innocent. Across the country, the Ron Williamson story has happened over and over. Since 1976, Illinois has executed 12 people–and freed 13 from death row as innocent. Last week Illinois Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions. The next day a California judge threw out the convictions of nine people after prosecutors said they were among at least 32 framed by a group of corrupt police officers within the Los Angeles Police Department. New innocence cases, based on DNA tests, are on the horizon in California, Texas, Florida and Louisiana.
A rare moment of enlightenment is at hand. In the last decade, DNA tests have provided stone-cold proof that 69 people were sent to prison and death row in North America for crimes they did not commit. The number has been rising at a rate of more than one a month. What matters most is not how the wrongly convicted got out of jail, but how they got into it. “How do you prevent another innocent man or woman from paying the ultimate penalty for a crime he or she did not commit?” asked Governor Ryan, a Republican and death-penalty supporter. “Today I cannot answer that question.”
In 22 states, the fabric of false guilt has been laid bare, and the same vivid threads bind a wealthy Oklahoma businessman and a Maryland fisherman; a Marine corporal in California and a boiler repairman in Virginia; a Chicago drifter and a Louisiana construction worker; a Missouri schoolteacher and the Oklahoma ballplayer. Sometimes, it turns out, eyewitnesses make mistakes. Snitches tell lies. Confessions are coerced or fabricated. Racism trumps the truth. Lab tests are rigged. Defense lawyers sleep. Cops lie.
DNA testing can’t solve these problems, but it reveals their existence. Many can be fixed with simple reforms. To simply ignore them means that more criminals go free, and the innocent will suffer. Clyde Charles learned the crushing weight of the status quo: he was freed just before Christmas, after 19 years of his life were squandered in Louisiana’s Angola prison. The last nine years were spent fighting for the DNA lab work that cleared him in a matter of hours. In 48 states, prisoners don’t have statutory rights to tests that could prove their innocence, and too often authorities stubbornly resist. In more than half its exonerations, the Innocence Project was forced into fierce litigation simply to get the DNA tests.
“Our procedure,” wrote Justice Learned Hand in 1923, “has always been haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream.” Nearly 75 years later, Judge Seay in Oklahoma wrote an epilogue to the writ of habeas corpus for Ron Williamson: “God help us, if ever in this great country we turn our heads while people who have not had fair trials are executed. That almost happened in this case.” For all the gigabytes of crime statistics kept in the United States, no account is taken of the innocent person, wrongly convicted, ultimately exonerated. No one has the job of figuring out what went wrong, or who did wrong. The moment has come to do so.
