US Men Freed After 36 Years in Prison on False Charges
The state prosecutor views what happened not as a victory but as a tragedy, because the men lost half their lives.
Three men wrongly convicted of murder in the US state of Maryland were released after 36 years in prison. BBC reports.
Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart and Ransom Watkins were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1984 for the murder of a 14-year-old boy a year earlier. They were released in Baltimore on Monday, November 25, after a judge overturned their convictions following a review of the case.
The case was reopened this year after Chestnut sent a letter to the Baltimore Innocence Project. He included in the letter evidence he had discovered last year.
Chestnut, Stewart and Watkins were arrested as teenagers in November 1983 after the death of Dewitt Duckett, who was shot in the neck on his way to class at Baltimore's Southern High School. His Georgetown University jacket was also stolen. Duckett's death received wide press coverage. It was the first fatal shooting of a student in Baltimore public schools.
The Maryland state prosecutor said that "these three men were convicted as children because of police and prosecutorial misconduct." Her statement says that detectives targeted the three men, who were Black boys, using coercion of other teenage witnesses to close the case.
Prosecutors said that during the initial investigation, police ignored and concealed reports from several witnesses identifying another person as the killer, and that trial witnesses failed to identify the three teenagers in police sketches.
All trial witnesses have recanted their testimony. However, the prosecutor does not consider the men's release a victory. She calls it a tragedy, since all authorities must acknowledge their responsibility for it. Another suspect in the murder died back in 2002.
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