Arrested as teens, three men exonerated after 36 years behind bars for wrongful murder conviction
The death of 14-year-old DeWitt Duckett was historically horrible. Walking down the hallway of his Baltimore middle school one afternoon in November 1983, he was accosted and shot for his Georgetown University jacket. He was the first student ever killed in a Baltimore school. The pressure to solve the case was intense, and early on Thanksgiving Day, Baltimore police arrested three teenagers from another school who were charged, as adults, with murder.
Several months later, all three were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. All three insisted they were innocent.
Gradually, as the decades passed, two of the men gave up hope of ever seeing the outside world again. But Alfred Chestnut, now 52, kept pushing. In May, he sent a handwritten letter to the Baltimore state’s attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, after seeing city prosecutor Marilyn Mosby discussing the unit on television, saying it was designed to check out claims of wrongful convictions. Chestnut included new evidence he’d uncovered last year that incriminated the man authorities now say was the actual shooter. The Baltimore prosecutors dug in quickly, reviewed the case and re-interviewed witnesses.
And on Monday afternoon, Chestnut and his childhood friends Ransom Watkins and Andrew Stewart were brought into the courtroom one last time in shackles and prison uniforms. After a brief review of the case by Lauren Lipscomb, the head of the prosecutor’s Conviction Integrity Unit, Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Charles J. Peters granted them writs of actual innocence and cleared the way for a new trial.
Lipscomb further described why the state believed the three men were innocent. She then dismissed all charges against all three men, adding, “Happy Thanksgiving.” The packed courtroom applauded.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2019/11/25/arrested-teens-three-men-are-expected-be-exonerated-after-years-behind-bars-wrongful-murder-conviction/?wpmk=1&wpisrc=al_news__alert-local--alert-national
Could you imagine losing that much of your life? My God!
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