Trio given life terms in ’83 killing cleared, freed

One defendant had never quit pushing to get case reviewed.

In the hallway of his Baltimore middle school one afternoon in November 1983, DeWitt Duckett, 14, was shot and killed for his Georgetown University jacket. The attack was shocking — the first killing in a Baltimore city school. And the pressure to solve the case was intense.

Early on Thanksgiving Day that year, police arrested three teenagers who were eventually convicted of murder.

On Monday, 36 years after the trio began serving life sentences, Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Charles Peters declared them innocent.

“On behalf of the criminal justice system, and I’m sure this means very little to you, I’m going to apologize,” Peters told them. “We’re adjourned.”

The packed courtroom erupted in applause, and family members began crying and hugging.

The extraordinary exonerations were set in motion through the perseverance of one of the defendants, Alfred Chestnut, now 52, who never stopped pushing for a review of the case. This spring his claim was picked up by the Baltimore state’s attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which uncovered a flawed case that prosecutors now say encouraged false witness testimony and ignored evidence of another assailant.

On Monday at 5:15 p.m., Chestnut and his childhood friends Ransom Watkins and Andrew Stewart walked out of the courthouse as free men, into the arms of weeping mothers and sisters and fiancees who doubted they would see this day.

“This is overwhelming,” said Chestnut, surrounded by cameras, lawyers and family. “I always dreamed of this. My mom, this is what she’s been holding on to forever. To see her son come home.”

As the decades passed, two of the men gave up hope of ever seeing the outside world again. But Chestnut kept pushing. In May, he sent a handwritten letter to city prosecutor Marilyn Mosby’s office, after seeing her on television discussing the unit dedicated to uncovering 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.