3 men freed after 36 years for wrongful conviction

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 apologise,” 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. This spring his claim was picked up by the Baltimore state attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which uncovered a flawed case that encouraged false witness testimony and ignored evidence.

On Monday, Chestnut and his childhood friends Ransom Watkins and Andrew Stewart walked out of the courthouse as free men. “This is overwhelming,” said Chestnut. “I always dreamed of this. My mom, this is what she’s been holding on to forever. To see her son come home.”

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