Wrongfully convicted man, now free: ‘I was finally heard’

ST. LOUIS >> As he languished in a Missouri prison for nearly three decades, Lamar Johnson never stopped fighting to prove his innocence, even when it meant doing much of the legal work himself.

This week a St. Louis judge overturned Johnson’s murder conviction and ordered him freed. Johnson closed his eyes and shook his head, overcome with emotion. Shouts of joy rang out from the packed courtroom, and several people — relatives, civil rights activists and others — stood to cheer. Johnson’s lawyers hugged each other and him.

“I can’t say I knew it would happen, but I would never give up fighting for what I knew to be the right thing, that freedom was wrongfully taken from me,” Johnson said.

Thanks to a team of lawyers, a Missouri law that changed largely because of his case, and his own dogged determination, he can start to put his life back together. “It’s persistence,” the 49-yearold said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press.

“You have to distinguish yourself. I think the best way to get (the court’s) attention, or anyone’s attention, is to do much of the work yourself,” Johnson said. “That means making discovery requests from law enforcement agencies and the courts, and that’s what I did. I wrote everybody.”

He said that he was able to contact people “who were willing to come forward and tell the truth.”

Johnson was just 20 in 1994 when his friend, Marcus Boyd, was shot to death on Boyd’s front porch by two masked men. Police and prosecutors arrested Johnson days later, blaming the killing on a dispute over drug money; both men were drug dealers.

From the outset, Johnson said he was innocent. His girlfriend backed his alibi that they were together when the killings occurred. The case against him was built largely on the account of an eyewitness who picked Johnson out of a police lineup, and a jailhouse informant who told a police detective that he overheard Johnson discussing the crime.

Decades of studies show that eyewitness testimony is right only about half the time — and since Johnson’s conviction, across the country there has been a reexamination of eyewitness identification procedures, which have been shown to often reproduce racial biases.