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GARY BEEMAN
In 1976, Gary Beeman was convicted of aggravated murder and
sentenced to death in Ohio. He maintained that he was innocent and that
Claire Liuzzo, an escaped prisoner who testified as the main prosecution
witness at Beeman’s first trial, was the actual killer. In 1978, the
District Court of Appeals granted Beeman a new trial, finding that
Beeman’s right to cross-examine Liuzzo had been unfairly restricted at
his first trial. On retrial, five witnesses testified that they heard
Liuzzo confess to the murder and Beeman was acquitted in 1979. Today
Beeman lives in Niagara Falls, N.Y. He is active in the movement against
the death penalty and speaks to audiences about his experience as a
survivor of death row.
ALBERT BURRELL
 After spending 13 years on death row, Albert Burrell was released
from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on January 3, 2001,
shortly after the Louisiana Attorney General dismissed charges against
him and his co-defendant, Michael Graham. Burrell and Graham had been
sentenced to death in 1987 for the murder of an elderly couple. Their
convictions were thrown out because of a lack of physical evidence and
suspect witness testimony used at trial. Prosecutor Dan Grady
acknowledged that the case was weak and “should never have been brought
to [the] grand jury.”
During the trial, prosecutors withheld key information from the
defense, failed to produce any physical evidence, and relied only on
witness testimony, which has since been discredited. Dismissing the
charges, the Attorney General's office cited a “total lack of credible
evidence” and stated “prosecutors would deem it a breach of ethics to
proceed to trial.” DNA tests later proved that blood found at the
victims’ home did not belong to Burrell or Graham. The trial attorneys
appointed to defend Burrell were later disbarred for other reasons.
Burrell lives and works in Center, Texas, and since his release
has been active in the movement against the death penalty with other
exonerated former death row prisoners.
GARY
DRINKARD
Gary Drinkard was sentenced to death in 1995 for the robbery and
murder of a 65-year-old automotive junk dealer in Decatur, Alabama, two
years earlier.
The conviction rested primarily on the testimony of Drinkard’s
half-sister, who faced charges in an unrelated robbery. In exchange for
her testimony, all charges against her were dismissed. Her common-law
husband also testified that Drinkard had admitted the murder. At his
trial, Drinkard was represented by two lawyers who specialized in debt
collection and foreclosures. They failed to present the testimony of two
physicians who would have testified that Drinkard had recently suffered
a severe back injury that made it physically impossible for him to
commit the crime.
In 2000, two years after the Court of Criminal Appeals of Alabama
affirmed the conviction, the Alabama Supreme Court reversed and remanded
the case for a new trial based on prosecutorial misconduct. At
Drinkard’s 2001 retrial, lawyers from the Southern Center for Human
Rights in Atlanta established that Drinkard had been at home at the time
of the murder, and he was acquitted.
Today, Gary lives and works in Cullman, Alabama, and is active in
the movement to abolish the death penalty.
SHUJAA GRAHAM
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Shujaa Graham was born in Lake
Providence, La., where he grew up on a plantation. His family
worked as sharecroppers, in the segregated South of the 1950s.
In 1961, he left to join his family, which had moved to South
Central Los Angeles, to try to build a more stable life. As a
teenager, Graham lived through the Watts riot and experienced
the police occupation of his community. In and out of trouble,
he spent much of his adolescent life in juvenile institutions,
until the age of 18, when he was sent to Soledad Prison.
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In 1973, Graham was framed in
the murder of a prison guard at the Deul Vocational Institute in
Stockton, Calif. The community became involved in his defense
and supported him through four trials. Graham and his
co-defendant, Eugene Allen, were sent to San Quentin’s death row
in 1976, after a second trial in San Francisco. The DA
systematically excluded all African American jurors and in 1979,
the California Supreme Court overturned the death conviction.
After spending three years on death row, Graham and Eugene Allen
continued to fight for their innocence. A third trial ended in
a hung jury, and after a fourth trial, they were found
innocent. As Graham often says, he won his freedom and affirmed
his innocence in spite of the system.
Graham was released in March
1981, and continued to organize in the Bay area, building
community support for the prison movement, as well as working
against police brutality. In the following years, Graham moved
away from the Bay area, learned landscaping and created his own
business. He and his wife, Phyllis Prentice, raised three
children and became part of a progressive community in Maryland,
where they live today.
See
www.shujaa.org
DAVID KEATON
David Keaton was the first of the 123 exonerees to be released
from death row because of his innocence. On the basis of
mistaken identification and coerced confessions, Keaton was
sentenced to death in Florida in July of 1971 at the age of 18
for the murder of an offf-duty deputy sheriff during a
robbery. His conviction was based on a coerced false
confession. The State Supreme Court reversed the conviction and
granted Keaton a new trial because of newly discovered
evidence. Charges were dropped and he was exonerated in 1973 but
Keaton was not released until 1979 after the actual killer was
identified and convicted.
Keaton lives in Quincy, Florida, and works against the death
penalty with other exonerated former death row prisoners. In the
movie The Exonerated, Keaton was played by actor Danny Glover.
RON KEINE
Along with three other co-defendants, Ron Keine was convicted of
the murder, kidnapping, sodomy and rape of University of New
Mexico student William Velten in 1974 and was sentenced to die
in New Mexico’s gas chamber. A subsequent investigation by
The Detroit News uncovered lies by the prosecution’s star
witness, perjured identification given under police pressure,
and the use of poorly administered lie detector tests. A state
district judge dismissed the original indictments and the men
were released in 1976 after the murder weapon was traced to a
drifter from South Carolina who admitted to the killing. (Detroit
News Magazine, 1/11/76 and Detroit News,
12/16/75). Ron returned to Michigan where he became a successful
businessman and became active in local politics. He lives
outside of Detroit and speaks to groups throughout the country
about his experience having survived death row and has done
numerous media interviews about his wrongful conviction and the
criminal just system.
RAY KRONE
Ray Krone grew up near York, Pennsylvania, with a loving family
and many friends. A former Boy Scout and high school athlete, he
became an Air Force sergeant and later, a mail carrier, before
finding himself on Arizona’s death row for a murder he did not
commit.
He was living a normal life until 1991, when Kim Ancona was
murdered in a Phoenix bar where Ray was an occasional
customer. His world was then turned upside down.
Ray refused to believe that our legal system would convict
him. He told his parents not to worry. When faced with the
choice of selling his house to pay for a lawyer, he opted to be
represented by a public defender instead. “I was thinking, ‘Why
should I sell my house when they’re going to know it’s not me as
soon as they investigate?’ ”
But Ray was convicted, based largely on circumstantial evidence
and the testimony of an “expert” witness who asserted that bite
marks found on the victim matched Ray’s teeth. In 1992, he was
sentenced to death.
He refused to give up, though, and continued to fight through the
appeals process. In 1994, Ray was granted a retrial. Based on
the same evidence, he was again convicted. The judge in the case
believed that the evidence was weak, and though he stopped short
of throwing out the conviction, he sentenced Ray to 46 years in
prison. At the age of 35, he was essentially facing a life
sentence.
Ray had been on death row for two years and eight months. During
that time, the state of Arizona executed three other men.
His appeals continued, though. In the spring of 2002, with the
help of attorney Alan Simpson, he was able to convince an
appeals court that DNA found at the murder scene pointed not to
him but to another man, Kenneth Phillips. When prosecutors
dropped the charges that April, Ray became the 100th person
exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973. He
had missed out on life in the 10 years and four months he was
imprisoned. He had never surfed the Internet, didn’t know how to
use a cell phone and had never heard of gel deodorant.
Ironically, though, in some ways Ray was lucky. Unlike nearly
every other prisoner on death row, he had financial support,
from his second cousin, Jim Rix, who spent more than $100,000 of
his own money for Ray’s legal fees. Ray also had the benefit of
DNA evidence, which is available in only about 15 percent of
cases.
Today, Ray works to avoid bitterness about his experience. “I
have the ability to be angry, but I’ve tried to avoid the
anger,” he says. “I sat in prison all that time, and I watched
people who were so bitter and angry that they became victims. At
some point you’ve got to take control of your life and rise
above things. I hope I won’t ever get to the point where I am so
overwhelmed with grief and tragedy that I would actually give
in.”
Now 49, he spends time with friends and family, and devotes his
life to improving the criminal justice system that failed
him. He has traveled throughout the United States and Europe,
telling his story to audiences that invariably are profoundly
moved by the ordeal he survived. Ray has spoken to hundreds of
groups, including numerous universities and law schools across
the country, as well as to state legislatures and governmental
bodies in England, Sweden, Italy and France. He has been
featured in numerous publications and on many radio and
television programs, including People and Parade magazines, USA
Today, the Los Angeles Times and Good Morning America.
Ray serves as director of communications and training for Witness
to Innocence, an
organization that brings to light the crisis of wrongful
convictions in death sentencing in the United States.
“I would not trust the state to execute a person for committing a
crime against another person,” he says. “I know how the system
works. I know what prison is like, I know what the judges are
like, I know what the prosecutors are like. It’s not about
justice or fairness or equality. It’s absolutely wrong. Any
chance I can, whether I start with one or two people or a whole
auditorium filled with people, I’ll tell them what happened to
me. Because if it happened to me, it can happen to anyone.”
RYAN MATTHEWS
Shortly after his 17th birthday, Ryan Matthews was arrested for
the murder of a local convenience store owner. Three individuals
interviewed by police were unable to definitively identify
Matthews, and witnesses described the murderer as short – no
taller than 5-8. Matthews is at least 6 feet tall. Matthews’
court-appointed trial attorney was unprepared, and unable to
handle the DNA evidence. On the third day of the trial, the
judge ordered closing arguments and sent the jury to deliberate.
When they could not agree on a verdict after several hours, the
judge ordered the jury to resume deliberations until a verdict
was reached. Less than an hour later, the jury returned a guilty
verdict and Matthews was sentenced to death two days later.
In March 2003, Matthews’ attorneys had the physical evidence
(including a ski mask) re-tested. The DNA results excluded
Matthews, and this time they pointed directly to another
individual – one serving time for a murder that happened a few
months after the convenience store murder and only blocks
away. In April 2004, based on the new DNA testing and findings
that the prosecution suppressed evidence, a new trial was
ordered for Matthews. His
mother Pauline Matthews dutifully attended the series of court hearings for her son over
the years. She traveled to Rome to appeal to the Pope to
intervene in Ryan’s case. Released
into her care after she posted bond, Matthews was officially
exonerated on August 9, 2004 when prosecutors dropped all of the
charges against him. At the age of 24, he became the nation’s
115th exonerated death row prisoner and the 14th
inmate freed with the help of DNA testing. Today, she says, she holds no bitterness about the ordeal. “I
don’t have time for anger,” she says. “What's been done, you
can't undo. I’ve had to rebuild Ryan’s life.”
Pauline is an outspoken opponent against the death penalty and
has told her story to numerous audiences, including members of
the British Parliament.
Since Ryan’s release, his sister Monique Matthews has been
a passionate and eloquent spokesperson about the death penalty
and other social justice issues. A member of the board of
Witness to Innocence, she has traveled extensively, telling the
story of her brother’s ordeal with the criminal justice system.
“I always wondered where my voice needed to be heard the most,”
she says. “I used to wonder what I was supposed to be doing,
what my calling was, and I think it’s this. I know when I speak
out that I’m speaking from experience. And I know what I’m
talking about. This has touched my life. My father was murdered,
and now I’m a victim in a different way, a victim of the
criminal justice system. So I’ve been on both sides. And when
you have to visit your brother on death row for a crime he
didn’t commit, it really opens your eyes.”
JUAN ROBERTO MELENDEZ-COLON
Juan Roberto Melendez-Colon spent seventeen years, eight months
and one day on Florida’s death row for a crime he did not
commit. Upon his exoneration and release from death row on
January 3, 2002, he became the 99th death row inmate
in the country to be exonerated and released since 1973.
There was no physical evidence ever linking Mr. Melendez to the
crime and his conviction and death sentence hinged on the
testimony of two questionable witnesses. Despite his innocence,
Mr. Melendez’s conviction and death sentence were upheld on
appeal three times by the Florida Supreme Court. In
September 2000, sixteen years after Mr. Melendez was convicted
and sentenced to death, a long-forgotten transcript of a taped
confession by the real killer, was fortuitously
discovered. Ultimately, it came to light that the real killer
made statements to no less than sixteen individuals either
directly confessing to the murder or stating that Mr. Melendez
was not involved.
In a seventy-two page opinion in which she overturned Mr.
Melendez’s conviction and death sentence and ordered a new
trial, Judge Barbara Fleischer went to tremendous lengths to
underscore the injustices that had been bestowed upon Mr.
Melendez and to show that an innocent man was on death row. She
chastised the prosecutor for withholding “crucial” evidence
pertaining to the credibility of the State’s two critical
witnesses and she set forth in meticulous detail the “newly
discovered evidence,” including numerous confessions and
incriminating statements made by the real killer to friends, law
enforcement officers, investigators and attorneys that
substantiated the defense theory that Mr. Melendez was
innocent. Without admitting any wrongdoing, the State of Florida
declined to pursue a new trial against Mr. Melendez because one
of its key witnesses had recanted and the other had died.
Upon his release from death row, without bitterness, anger or
hatred toward those responsible for wrongfully convicting him
and sentencing him to death, Mr. Melendez has traveled
throughout the United States, speaking to audiences about his
story of supreme injustice. When he is not speaking throughout
the country, he works at home in Puerto Rico in a plantain field
where he counsels troubled youth who work alongside him. As a
former migrant farm worker, Mr. Melendez’s idol and inspiration
was and continues to be Cesar Chavez.
Mr. Melendez has spoken at numerous colleges and universities, as
well as at conventions, conferences and sym
posiums throughout the United States, including the Second World
Congress Against the Death Penalty, in Montreal, Canada, October
2004; the national LULAC (League of United Latin American
Citizens) convention in San Antonio, July 2004; Capital Defense
Seminar, Monterey, March 2004; Amnesty International national
conferences, New York, 2004 and Atlanta, 2003 (keynote speaker);
and NCADP (National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty)
national conferences in Washington D.C., October, 2004 (keynote
speaker) Nashville, October 2003 and Chicago, October 2002
(keynote speaker).
Mr. Melendez is
a board member of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death
Penalty and the Journey of Hope . . . From Violence to Healing.
RANDY STEIDL
Gordon “Randy” Steidl was freed from an Illinois prison May 28,
2004, 17 years after he was wrongly convicted and sentenced to
die for the 1986 murders of Dyke and Karen Rhoads. An Illinois
State Police investigation in 2000 found that local police had
severely botched their investigation, resulting in the wrongful
conviction of Steidl and his co-defendant, Herbert Whitlock. Due
to the poor representation Steidl received at trial, a new
sentencing hearing was granted in 1999, resulting in a sentence
of life without parole.
Steidl was convicted eleven months later and sentenced to death,
but the death sentence was commuted to life in prison without
parole in 1999 after a judge found that Steidl's trial attorney
had not adequately prepared for the sentencing hearing.
In 2003, federal judge Michael McCuskey overturned Steidl's
conviction and ordered a new trial for Steidl, stating that if
all the evidence that should have been investigated had been
presented at trial, it was “reasonably probable” that Steidl
would have been acquitted by the jury. The state reinvestigated
the case, testing DNA evidence, and found no link to
Steidl. State Attorney General Lisa Madigan decided not to
appeal the ruling and Edgar County prosecutors decided they
would not retry the case.
Steidl left the prison escorted by his wife of nine months,
Patty, his mother, Bobbie, and his brother, Rory. “I'm laying
this cross down today,” Steidl said after leaving Danville
Correctional Center. “I'm not carrying it any more.”
Steidl became the 18th person since Illinois reinstated the death
penalty in 1977 to be freed because of a wrongful conviction
after serving time on the state’s death row.
Now 54, Steidl, has been adjusting to his new life, working in
the construction business while he seeks to become more active
in the movement against the death penalty.
SHABAKA WAQLIMI
In October 1983, Shabaka WaQlimi (Joseph Green Brown) came within
13 hours of being killed in Florida’s electric chair when a new
trial was ordered in his case.
Twice a day, he had heard the lightning-like noise from his death
watch cell, 30 feet away. When a prison tailor came to measure
him for his burial suit, he was put back into his cell kicking
and screaming. He refused to order the traditional last meal.
In 1974, a Hillsborough County jury convicted Brown of raping and
murdering Earlene Treva Barksdale, a clothing store owner and
wife of a prominent Tampa lawyer. The case hinged on Ronald
Floyd, a man who held a grudge against Brown because Brown had
once turned him in for a robbery. The jury also got to see a
purported smoking gun – a .38-caliber handgun that prosecutor
Robert Bonanno said was the murder weapon.
But an FBI ballistics expert said the handgun could not possibly
have fired the fatal bullet – a witness the jury never heard
from – and several months later, Floyd admitted that he lied.
Florida courts granted no relief, however, and in the fall of
1983, Gov. Bob Graham signed Brown’s death warrant. Charges in
his case were finally dropped after the 11th Circuit Court of
Appeals ruled that the prosecution had knowingly allowed false
testimony to be introduced at trial. Brown was released in 1987
when the state decided not to retry the case. He had spent 13
years on death row.
More than two decades later, Shabaka – Swahili for uncompromising
– puts his outrage to work trying to solve the problems of
struggling people. He currently works with troubled youth at a
non-profit organization in Washington, D.C.
His biggest victory to date, he says, is that “I’m alive. . . .
that’s good enough for me.”
GREG WILHOIT
 
Greg Wilhoit grew up in Tulsa, Okla., the second of three
children, in an average, middle class, Christian family. He was
a Boy Scout, played sports, and was in the bell choir at
church. He attended the University of Oklahoma, but left his
sophomore year to pursue a career as a journeyman ironworker. He
loved being an ironworker and contributed to many of Tulsa’s
most impressive structures. He owned his own home and was
leading a comfortable life.
In 1983, he married Kathy Godwin, and their first daughter,
Kristen, was born in 1984. Ten months later, Kathy gave birth to
their second daughter, Kimberly. Greg loved his family, but in
May 1985 he and Kathy separated to try and work out some
problems. Kathy, Krissy and Kim moved into an apartment across
town, but Greg saw them almost daily.
On June 1, 1985 Kathy was found brutally murdered in her
apartment. A neighbor had heard Krissy and Kim crying and called
the police. Greg was home alone sleeping, so he had no alibi,
but he never dreamed that anyone would think that he had
anything to do with Kathy’s death. He tried to get on with his
life, working, raising his daughters and grieving the loss of
his wife.
Almost a year later, Greg was stunned when he was unexpectedly
arrested and charged with Kathy’s murder. The prosecution’s case
was based on the statements of two dental “experts,” one of whom
had been out of dental school less than a year, who said that a
bite mark found on Kathy’s body matched Greg’s teeth.
Greg’s parents hired two well known Tulsa defense attorneys who
spent a year on the case but never looked at the evidence,
talked to any witnesses, or tried to find another expert to
examine the bite mark. They tried to get Greg to accept a plea
bargain, which he refused to do. As Greg said, “They couldn’t
grasp the concept that if you’re innocent, you don’t plead
guilty.”
Three weeks before Greg’s trial was scheduled to start, he fired
those attorneys and hired another lawyer who had a reputation as
one of the top defense attorneys in the state to represent
him. He assumed his attorney would ask for a continuance so he
would have time to prepare for the trial, but his attorney said
that wasn’t necessary. Unfortunately, even though he had at one
time been an outstanding attorney, that time had passed.
Unbeknownst to Greg or his parents in the preceding years the
attorney had become an alcoholic and had developed
alcohol-related brain damage. He embodied the definition of an
incompetent attorney and did no preparation whatsoever for
Greg’s trial. He appeared in court drunk, threw up in the
judge’s chambers, and literally put on no defense. Since the
jury basically only heard the prosecution’s case, Greg was found
guilty and sentenced to death. At the sentencing, Greg said,
“The judge told me I was to die by lethal injection. ‘If that
fails we’ll electrocute you. If the power goes out, we’ll hang
you. And if the rope breaks we’ll take you out back and shoot
you.’”
Greg was sent to death row in McAlester, Okla., which he thought
would be the last home he would ever know. He was assigned an
attorney, Mark Barrett, from the Oklahoma Indigent Defense
System to handle his appeal. Barrett was convinced of Greg’s
innocence and worked tirelessly for more than four years to help
correct a terrible wrong. The 12 top forensic odontologists in
the country examined the bite mark evidence and all 12 testified
that the bite mark could not possibly be Greg’s.
A new trial was eventually granted and Greg was out on bail for
two years, with the nightmare he was living hanging over his
head while the district attorney decided whether or not to retry
the case. A second trial was held in 1993, but after the
prosecution presented its case – without the bite mark evidence
which had been disqualified – the judge issued a directed
verdict of innocence and Greg was cleared of all charges.
Greg moved to Sacramento, Calif., where he still lives today. He
lost eight years of his life, the opportunity to raise his two
daughters, and his livelihood, and suffered health problems from
his experience. He is now on Social Security disability for
post- traumatic stress disorder. He has never received an
apology or one penny in compensation.
Despite the challenges he continues to face, Greg is moving
forward with his life. He has found that sharing his story about
the horrors of the death penalty and the fallibility of the
justice system gives him a purpose. His hope is that when people
are educated about the death penalty and are face-to-face with a
living example of how easy it would be to execute an innocent
man, that the tide in this great country will turn and we will
end this barbaric practice forever.
HAROLD WILSON
More than 16 years after a Pennsylvania jury returned three death
sentences against Harold Wilson, new DNA evidence helped lead to
his acquittal. On November 15, 2005, Wilson became the nation’s
122nd person freed from death row, according to the Death
Penalty Information Center. During his 1989 capital trial,
Wilson was prosecuted by former Philadelphia Assistant District
Attorney Jack McMahon, a man best known for his role in a
training video that advised new Philadelphia prosecutors on how
to use race in selecting death penalty juries.
In 1999, Wilson’s death sentence was overturned when a court
determined that his defense counsel had failed to investigate
and present mitigating evidence during his original trial. A
later appeal led the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to call for a
new hearing because of evidence that McMahon used racially
discriminatory practices in jury selection. In 2003, a trial
court found that McMahon had improperly exercised his peremptory
strikes to eliminate potential black jurors and granted Wilson a
new trial, a decision that the District Attorney’s office did
not appeal.
The court stated that in the new trial the death penalty
could not be sought. The jury in this most recent trial
acquitted Wilson of all charges, after new DNA evidence revealed
blood from the crime scene that did not come from Wilson or any
of the victims, a finding suggesting the involvement of another
assailant. With his family in the courtroom, Wilson wept as the
jury read the verdict.
Since his release, Wilson has been a passionate advocate
against the death penalty and for reform of the criminal justice
system. He has spoken at numerous venues, including the
University of Pennsylvania, Temple University Law School, Johns
Hopkins University, the Amnesty International Delaware state
conference, and at the Fast & Vigil to Abolish the Death Penalty
at the United States Supreme Court. |
