WRONGFULLY JAILED Justice at last
Three unlawfully convicted Maryland men finally walk free
After being arrested as teenagers and spending nearly four decades behind bars for a murder they didn’t commit, Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart and Ransom Watkins, now in their 50s, were released from prison on November 25. “We’re smiling. We’re happy that we’re free,” Watkins told the crowd outside the courthouse in Baltimore, Maryland. “But we’ve got a lot to fix … This should have never happened.”
On Thanksgiving Day 1984, the trio were taken away from their homes at gunpoint and arrested for the murder of 14-year-old DeWitt Duckett, a Baltimore junior high student who was shot in the neck on his way to class and had his Georgetown University jacket stolen.
The three teenagers had been wagging high school before a security guard escorted them off the junior high campus about half an hour before the murder occurred. They were convicted based on witness testimony and a Georgetown University jacket found in Chestnut’s bedroom, despite the jacket having no traces of blood or gunshot residue and Chestnut’s mother producing a receipt showing she had bought it recently.
In May, the case was reopened after Chestnut sent a letter to Baltimore’s Conviction Integrity Unit along with evidence incriminating another man, which led to the discovery that evidence had been withheld from the defence team during their trial. The findings were troubling. Witnesses twice failed to pick the trio out of a line-up and had identified a different shooter, who was
allegedly seen wearing Duckett’s jacket and even confessed to the murder. That suspect died in 2002.
“These three men were convicted, as children, because of police and prosecutorial misconduct,” Baltimore state attorney Marilyn Mosby said after the men were released. “Detectives targeted the three men, all 16-year-old black boys, using coaching and coercion of other teenage witnesses to make their case. I don’t think that today is a victory, it’s a tragedy.”