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Executed after conviction based on faulty eye-witness Rafay/Burns
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Michael Williams
The sidebar has links to other
wrongful conviction stories on this website. This list is by
no means complete. The Innocence Project has, as of March 15,
2005, freed 157 people, based on DNA evidence. We know that there
are other reasons why individuals are wrongfully convicted: Framing
by police (yes, it happens) | Coerced
confessions | Bad fingerprinting
techniques.
Michael Williams freed
from Angola Prison, Louisiana, after 24 years
-
Innocence
Project New Orleans
- 636 Baronne St., 2nd Floor
- New Orleans, LA 70113
- Friday March 11th, 2005
Innocence Project News -Exoneration
Michael Williams of Louisiana
is going to be released and exonerated today. We are extremely
excited to welcome Michael home after twenty-four long years
in Angola prison. Michael went into prison at age sixteen and
will be 40 when he walks out this morning.
Michael was wrongfully convicted
of rape at age sixteen, based solely on a mistaken eyewitness
identification. Despite his young age, under Louisiana's draconian
sentencing laws, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility
of parole. While in prison, many of his closest family members
died and he lost touch with friends. Since 1990, he has had no
contact with anyone outside of prison (no calls, no letters,
no visits)-other than with students and staff at the IP and our
colleagues at the IP of New Orleans. Finally, in December, DNA
tests of evidence previously overlooked by prosecutors proved
his innocence. At the age of 40, he will finally experience freedom
as an adult.
But he has a long road ahead
of him. As an exoneree, he will have no access to state services,
available to those on parole, to help ease his transition back
into society. In addition, Louisiana, unlike many other states
and the federal government, has no law that provides compensation
to the wrongfully convicted. Only 19 states have such laws. Today
we will call for a just compensation statute to be passed in
Louisiana and will work with our allies there to make sure it
happens. The circumstances of Michael's case are heartbreaking
and demonstrate the serious need to reform the system.
As it happens, Barry is also
in Louisiana today participating in a state-wide seminar for
law enforcement officials to talk about eyewitness identification
reforms that we believe, if adopted, will prevent future wrongful
convictions. We will keep you posted about these efforts, too.
I hope you will join us in
celebrating Michael's exoneration and share the news with others.
If you would like to make a donation to Michael directly, you
may contact the Innocence Project New Orleans. Please make out
checks to the Innocence Project- New Orleans and write "Michael
Williams" in the memo section. Checks may be mailed to:
Innocence Project New Orleans
636 Baronne St., 2nd Floor New Orleans, LA 70113
For more information about
Michael's story or the causes and remedies of wrongful conviction,
please visit our website at
www.innocenceproject.org.
For more information about
life after exoneration, please visit the Life After Exoneration
Program's website at www.exonerated.org.
Thank you once again for your
invaluable support. We could not do this life-saving work without
you.
La. frees inmate, 40,
believed innocent
By PENNY BROWN ROBERTS,
Baton Rouge Advocate staff writer, March 12, 2005
ANGOLA -- As an overcast sky
turned blue above the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Michael Anthony
Williams signed his name in the prisoner release book, changed
clothes in a public restroom and left the only home he's known
since the age of 16.
His first act beyond the electronic
gates and razor wire Friday morning wasn't a lavish meal or a
tearful reunion with family and friends.
Instead, it was a drive to
a white stucco building -- blue paint peeling from the trim --
at Laurel and North 18th streets near downtown Baton Rouge, where
the 40-year-old quietly got his first apartment.
"It needs a little cleaning,"
he said of his new home. "It's definitely better than a
prison cell."
The Chatham man who spent 24
years in prison was freed Friday after DNA testing confirmed
he is not the man who sexually assaulted his 22-year-old tutor
in February 1981. He has been released without bond pending a
new trial, should authorities decide to pursue one within the
year.
Jackson Parish District Attorney
Walter May said authorities have reopened the case and are using
technology not available at the time of the attack to take another
look at the crime.
The victim was assaulted in
the tiny north Louisiana town after a man entered a window in
her apartment and beat her with a wooden board, leaving blood
on the bed, walls, drapes and furniture. He had intercourse with
her three times before leaving.
She identified Williams --
whom she had known since he was a little boy and was tutoring
in math -- as her attacker, claiming she saw him in the moonlight
and recognized his voice. Williams, who was 16 at the time and
attending night school, admitted to having a crush on her and
previously had been arrested after an altercation with the woman.
None of the physical evidence
-- including clothing worn during the attack or a muddy shoe
print -- linked Williams to the crime. Nevertheless, a Jackson
Parish jury convicted him after deliberating less than an hour,
and a judge sentenced him to life in prison without parole.
The Innocence Project -- a
non-profit legal clinic that uses DNA testing to exonerate the
wrongfully convicted -- took on Williams' case in 2003. Williams
wrote to the organization after seeing its co-founder, Barry
Scheck, defend O.J. Simpson.
With the cooperation of the
Jackson Parish District Attorney's Office, independent laboratories
conducted three rounds of tests on semen stains from the victim's
nightgown and the inside of her robe. All concluded that Williams'
DNA was not a match.
May, who had just graduated
from law school when Williams was convicted, said he agreed to
DNA testing last year after reading a transcript of the trial
and realizing "there was no physical evidence at all --
none -- to tie the defendant to this crime."
The victim could not be located
Friday for comment. Her father -- who is not being named to protect
her identity -- would not answer questions about Williams' release.
"You probably know how
we feel right now," he said. "I just don't want to
make any comments."
But May said he's kept in touch
with the victim, and although DNA evidence points to someone
else committing the sexual assault, "she's so certain he
was there that she now feels there must have been two people
present. At the trial, of course, there was no suggestion that
two people were present."
Doug Stokes, Williams' court-appointed
lawyer for the trial, said it was "very gratifying"
to know that his former client is now free.
"This was the only case
in my 12 years of criminal defense work in which I felt the jury
had not reached a just verdict," said Stokes, 53, who became
a Jackson Parish prosecutor in 1990. "I say that not to
be critical of them, but the verdict was just not supported by
evidence."
Williams walked out of Angola
shortly after 9:30 a.m. Friday morning, his face shifting between
smiles and wide-eyed uncertainty. He was escorted by his Innocence
Project lawyer, Vanessa Potkin, and one of the organization's
New Orleans advocates, Barry Gerharz.
Wearing a white T-shirt, blue
jeans with rolled cuffs and brown work boots, he carried two
manila envelopes, a half-eaten bag of peanut M&Ms and a $10
check from the state of Louisiana, given to prisoners upon their
release.
"I thank God for this,"
Williams said, later adding that he "never doubted, never
gave up" that he eventually would be released.
After getting his apartment,
Williams had lunch with his lawyers at Chelsea's Grill, where
he feasted on shrimp.
At an afternoon news conference
at LSU's Paul M. Hebert Law School, Williams described his time
in prison as "a living hell. A lot of terrible things happened
to me while I was in there." He said that when he was younger,
he was sexually abused while guards "turned their backs."
At the same time, Williams
lost contact with his family after "they kind of gave up
on me." His mother died before his conviction; his father,
after his imprisonment. All but two of his six brothers and sisters
believed him guilty, and none of them have come to visit him
in 15 years.
While in prison, Williams earned
his GED, and now hopes to turn a love of sewing into a career
in interior decorating. He said he's certain the transition from
prison to freedom is "not going to be hard. Just take it
one day at a time."
Of the accuser whose testimony
put him behind bars for much of his life, Williams said, "I
don't know why she said what she said. God has a plan for people
like that."
Williams is the ninth Louisiana
prisoner freed after a wrongful conviction in the past two years
and one of more than 20 since 1989. The last was Ryan Matthews,
24, who was released from death row last August after DNA cleared
him of a 1997 murder.
Scheck said Williams' case
is further proof that Louisiana should enact legislation to provide
compensation for exonerated prisoners. Nineteen other states
have such measures.
"Just imagine being 16
years old and going away to prison for a crime you didn't commit,"
Scheck said, adding that if the criminal justice system "steals
a man's life for 24 years, don't we have to rebuild it?"
Rep. Cedric Glover, D-Shreveport,
plans to again propose legislation that would provide money,
education and counseling to inmates freed because of wrongful
conviction. Previous efforts have failed; last year, a bill that
would have paid about $14,000 for each year an exonerated person
spent in prison failed to pass the Senate before the end of the
session.
Glover said Friday any compensation
package likely would be retroactive to include Williams and others
deemed wrongfully convicted.
Williams, meanwhile, plans
to spend his first full day of freedom today shopping for clothes
and perhaps taking in the new John Travolta flick, "Be Cool."
While he hopes to someday reunite
with his family, he has no plans to ever set foot in his hometown
again.
Said Williams: "I don't
want to see that place no more." http://2theadvocate.com/stories/031205/new_freed001.shtml
- Rough landing for exonerated
inmate
- He's one of 159 who
have been freed after DNA testing
Anna Badkhen, San Francisco
Chronicle Staff Writer, Monday, May 9, 2005
Baton Rouge, La. -- As so often
happens lately, Michael Anthony Williams is lost.
The driver's license examiner
towers over him, rattling off orders through the rolled-down
window on the driver's side. But at each command, Williams, 40,
hesitates. He signals to the left when he is told to turn right.
He forgets to turn off the windshield wipers.
He fails the test, another
blow in Williams' quest to put together a life that was taken
from him when he was just a boy.
At the age of 16, a sophomore
in Jonesboro High School in northern Louisiana, he was arrested
and convicted of raping his female math tutor. He spent 24 years
in the Angola state penitentiary. Two months ago, he walked free.
A DNA test -- which didn't exist when he was growing up -- proved
what Williams had claimed all along: the state had gotten the
wrong man.
Now, like dozens of others
wrongfully accused and subsequently exonerated, a bewildered,
once-young man finds himself, without resources, thrown into
a world with which he is entirely unfamiliar.
Tasks that are second nature
for most adults -- using a cell phone, leaving a voice message,
going to an ATM, paying the phone bill or turning on a blinker
-- for Williams are pieces of a puzzle he has yet to figure out.
"I got to find a new
life," says Williams, a heavyset man who was an inside linebacker
on his prison football team. A black skullcap covers his receding
hairline; a key to his apartment hangs on a ribbon strung around
his neck. "It's not gonna be easy. It's not gonna be fast."
Williams is one of 159
people who have been jailed and then freed in the United States
through post-conviction DNA testing since it became available
in 1989, according to the Innocence Project, a national group
that works on preventing and reversing wrongful convictions.
Justice may have been served,
but in most cases these people have lost virtually everything
they ever owned.
Almost half suffer from
depression, anxiety disorder or some form of post- traumatic
stress disorder, according to a study by Lola Vollen, director
of the DNA Identification Technology and Human Rights Center
in Berkeley. None has access to public services such as health
insurance, job training and anger management that are routinely
available to ex-convicts on parole to help their transition back
into society. Some states, including California, award financial
compensation to the wrongfully convicted. Compensation packages
vary from state to state, and in California reach $100 per day
of incarceration. But Louisiana, where 18 people have been exonerated
since 1989, has no compensation for people such as Williams.
Check for
$10
Upon his release, the state
of Louisiana cut Williams a check for $10. He keeps it in a frame
on his coffee table.
"They are expected
to jump right in and pick up their lives where supposedly they
left them off," said Ernest Duff, who heads the Berkeley-based
Life After Exoneration program. "But after being institutionalized
like that it's very, very hard to move forward."
Like most exonerated inmates,
Williams, who finished high school in prison, has no marketable
job experience and few social skills. Unlike most others, Williams
had almost no contact with the outside world during the years
he was inside.
His mother died when he
was 12. Both of his grandparents, who brought him up, and his
father died while he was in prison. His four brothers and two
sisters stopped calling, writing or visiting him in 1990. During
the last 15 years of his imprisonment, Williams' only visitors
were his lawyers from the Innocence Project.
Now, he rises early in
the morning and starts dozing off around 8 p.m. He had one job,
at a construction site, for three weeks but quit, he says, after
a conflict with the foreman who "felt like I got lucky and
got out of prison." He has $1,400 saved up and is frugal
with it, partly because he doesn't know what to spend it on.
He does not go out with friends because he doesn't have any.
He does not have a girlfriend.
He says he has never had sex. He does not know how to meet women.
"They're all taken,"
he says with a shrug. He stares out the car window, watching
white egrets flush from the bayous on both sides of the road.
Williams' time inside,
isolated, makes it hard for him to "interact with people
socially and pick up on social cues," says Barry Gerharz,
who runs Inside/Out, a New Orleans program that helps exonerated
prisoners return to normal life. "Michael's adjustment is
and will be difficult."
Not a homey
apartment
On many days, Williams
stays in his ascetic, one-bedroom apartment in Baton Rouge, watching
"Amazing Race" on CBS. He laughs at all the prison
scenes in "Raising Arizona," one of the DVDs in his
small collection. He draws pencil sketches of cartoon-like cats
and birds on thin paper.
His apartment, on the first
floor of a red-brick apartment complex, is so clean it suggests
little human activity takes place there. Not a single picture
adorns the off-white walls. The bed with a beige spread and burgundy
comforter is meticulously made, so unruffled it could be made
of a solid piece of plastic. After sharing a barracks at the
penitentiary with 63 other inmates for more than two decades,
Williams says that life on the outside feels lonely.
The acquaintances he does
have seem to be related to prison in some way. Ashanti Witherspoon,
in charge of video production at the enormous, nondenominational
Miracle Place Church in Baker, La., served 27 years in prison
for armed robbery. Susan Martin was arrested in 1987 after rustling
640 cows in 30 days by putting sneakers on their hooves and packing
them into four 18-wheeler trucks. Her roommate, Carol Batey,
is the fiancee of Martin's brother, Hulen, who is still in Angola
for aggravated child rape, which he says he did not commit. Williams
knows these people through the Innocence Project and through
the Miracle Place Church, which Williams likes because "people
can come here as they is, no need to dress up."
One sunny afternoon, Martin
thinks Williams needs entertainment. She drags a boom box onto
the narrow back porch of the house she shares with Batey, and
begins to dance on the patchy lawn in stocking feet to a CD of
Christian music. The yard smells like garbage. Williams watches
her, a can of Coke in hand, tapping his foot to the music.
Soon, Williams' attention
switches to his new cell phone. He has recently set up a tune
from "Mission Impossible" as the ring tone, and now
is exploring the phone's other options. He punches in names and
phone numbers written in the red spiral notebook he carries in
the chest pocket of his short-sleeved shirt. With the tiny cell
phone camera, he takes pictures.
Asked about his family,
and why they had not communicated with him for 15 years, Williams
offers little.
"They must've wanted
to get on with their lives," he says. "Past is past."
Since his release, he has
visited his younger sister, Kay, in Virginia, and his brother,
Roger, in northern Louisiana. He is considering moving to Virginia
to live with Kay, a dentist. But she has just moved into a new
house, and he doesn't have her new phone number.
For now, he prefers to
think about other things he's missed. He wants to go to Disney
World -- "never been there," he says. He wants to buy
books on interior design he saw at a Barnes & Noble. And
a nail gun, for putting stuff up on the wall -- "much better
than using a hammer."
He wants to eat a lot of
shrimp. In prison, Williams said, "you see a lot of beans,
a lot of rice, meat." At Sammy's Grill in Zachary, about
7 miles north of Baton Rouge, Williams orders an enormous plate
of deep-fried oysters, fish and shrimp, which he eats delicately
with two fingers, leaving the shrimp for the last.
Williams also wants a pet,
like one of the raccoons, perhaps, who feed at the Dumpster in
his apartment complex. One evening, he walks over to the Dumpster
and throws half of an ice cream sandwich to a raccoon. The animal
gingerly approaches the sweet mess on the asphalt, sniffs it,
picks it up with its front paws. As Williams begins to walk away,
he calls out to the raccoon:
"I've got your number,
buddy. I'm gonna get you. I'm on to you, buddy."
No rush
to get job
Getting a job is not so
urgent. He's not looking for one right now, although he says
he'd like to work in interior design, "do something creative."
Such seeming complacency
is a pattern among exonerated inmates, Duff says.
"They have a sense
of entitlement because they were in prison for something they
didn't do, and now they're looking for society to make amends
to them in a way that other prisoners are not," he says.
Duff likens people like
Williams to refugees who are coming home after spending decades
in refugee camps: traumatized, unused to making independent decisions.
He says they need compensation packages, access to health care
benefits and social services, counseling by specialists in human
rights and torture, and constant contact with family members
"to bring them back into the fold of humanity."
So far, Williams has received
none of the above.
On Tuesday, Williams got
his first electric bill.
On Wednesday, he saw someone
lock the car using a remote control for the first time.
Yellow "Support Our
Troops" ribbons on cars surprise him. Angola inmates didn't
talk much about the war in Iraq.
"We had our own war
in there," Williams says with a quiet laugh, massaging the
scar near his left elbow, where an inmate stabbed him with an
ice pick. Surviving 24 years in Angola, one of the nation's most
notoriously violent prisons, is a memory Williams prefers not
to share. He describes his time there simply as "terrible."
The next juncture in his
learning curve, he says, will be operating a computer, something
he hopes to do soon.
"I need to get the
mouse," he says. "I don't know how to use the mouse."
Williams knows what he
wants his first car to be: a Chevrolet Avalanche, a large pickup
truck.
But first, he has to pass
his driver's test.
E-mail Anna Badkhen at
abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell