Tampa man wrongfully imprisoned for nearly four decades to receive $14m
A Tampa, Florida, man who has been authorized to receive $14m for spending nearly four decades in prison over a rape and murder which he did not commit says he hopes his case makes it easier for the unjustly convicted to achieve justice before it’s too late for them.
“I’m just grateful,” Robert DuBoise told the New York Times of the compensation that Tampa’s city council voted to pay him to settle a lawsuit over his wrongful conviction. He said he hoped others in his position now “get justice and can move on without having to spend the rest of their life fighting the system that has already wronged them”.
DuBoise was 18 at the time that 19-year-old Barbara Grams was raped and beaten to death as she walked home from her Tampa restaurant job in August 1983. A medical examiner determined that someone had bitten Grams on one of her cheeks, prompting investigators to take bite samples from multiple men, including DuBoise.
Authorities concluded the bite was inflicted by DuBoise, who didn’t know Grams but frequented the area where she was found dead. He was sentenced to die in 1985, though his punishment was later reduced to life imprisonment.
DNA testing that was not available when Grams’s killing was first scrutinized eventually implicated two other men: Amos Robinson and Abron Scott. Robinson and Scott are each serving life imprisonment for a different slaying. And they are now awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges in Grams’s death.
Meanwhile, the forensic dentist who initially determined that DuBoise bit Grams ultimately retracted that finding, saying he no longer believed that bite marks could be matched to any one individual. And a prison informant’s testimony that DuBoise had once admitted to murdering Grams was also later discredited.
DuBoise earned his release from prison in 2020 with help from the Innocence Project organization that aids the wrongfully convicted. He then sued
Tampa’s city government, police investigators and the forensic dentist who linked him to Grams’s body.
While Tampa maintains that none of its investigators engaged in intentional wrongdoing, the city and DuBoise agreed to settle his lawsuit on 11 January. The city council then voted at a meeting on Thursday to pay $9m to DuBoise and his law firm this year, $3m in 2025 and $2m in 2026, documents show.
“This was a big wrong,” council member Luis Viera said at Thursday’s session, which DuBoise did not attend. “I hope and pray this settlement will give some measure of comfort.”
Tampa’s police chief, Lee Bercaw, said in a statement that investigators are better trained and have been able to access better technology since the Grams killing.
“We recognize the profound and lasting effects on this case, especially on Mr DuBoise,” Bercaw’s statement said.
Yet criminal courts continue admitting “junk” science that is similar to the kind that at one point had sent DuBoise to death row, his attorney, Gayle Horn, warned to the New York Times.
DuBoise – who still lives in Tampa – told the Associated Press that he has plans to buy a house, supports himself as a maintenance director at a local country club and does other repair jobs as well.
He said Thursday’s vote to him meant the legal ordeal that had dominated much of his life is “finally over”.
“I’m glad I don’t have to spend any more years of my life pursuing this,” DuBoise said to the AP. “Money, houses, cars, none of that stuff can ever restore what I lost.
“I don’t feel bitter about anything. I don’t want to waste my time with bitterness and pity parties.”