“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 stated.
Thanks to a staff of legal professionals, a Missouri legislation that modified largely due to his case, and his personal dogged dedication, he can begin to put his life again collectively.
“It’s persistence,” the 49-year-old stated 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 had been keen to come back ahead and inform the reality”.
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.
At a December hearing on Johnson’s innocence claim, eyewitness James Gregory Elking testified that the detective had “bullied” him into naming Johnson as a shooter, allegedly telling Elking, “I know you know who it is,” and urging him to “help get these guys off the street.”
St. Louis Circuit Judge David Mason also heard testimony calling into question the informant’s integrity. Even more, an inmate at South Central Correctional Centre in Licking, Missouri — James Howard — came forward to tell the judge that he and another man were the shooters — and that Johnson wasn’t involved. Howard is currently serving a life term for an unrelated murder.
After two months of review, Mason announced his ruling Tuesday.
“It felt like a weight had been lifted off me,” Johnson said. “I think that came out in how emotional I got afterward. I was finally heard.”
It was a moment that he wasn’t sure would ever come.
A connection to another wrongfully convicted man also played a pivotal role in Johnson’s eventual freedom.
Ricky Kidd was convicted of killing two men in Kansas City in 1996. He was sent to the Potosi Correctional Centre, where he and Johnson became friends. One day, in the prison yard, Johnson turned to Kidd.
“He stated, ‘You might not believe me, but I’m harmless,'” Kidd recalled. “I stated, ‘Oh yeah? You might not believe me but I’m harmless, too!’”
The two grew to become cellmates. Eventually, the Midwest Innocence Project agreed to tackle Kidd’s case. Meanwhile, Johnson’s effort was going nowhere. Kidd recalled an evening when he was woke up by Johnson’s quiet sobs and the sound of his ft pacing the ground.
“He said, ‘Man, I don’t think I’m going to make it out. I keep getting these doors shut,'” Kidd said. “I said, ‘You got to hang in there.’”
Johnson tried to remain busy. That included working within the jail hospice unit. It gave him a brand new perspective.
“Growing up where I grew up, death, shootings, all those kinds of things are kind of normal,” he said. Working in hospice, “You develop a greater appreciation of life, as you see someone go through that death process.”
Meanwhile, Kidd talked to an investigator with the Innocence Project and made the case that since Johnson had already performed a lot background work himself that the method would have a head begin. The organisation took on his case.
Lindsay Runnels, a Kansas City lawyer who companions with the Innocence Project, stated Johnson’s work was important. For instance, she stated his Freedom of Information Act requests uncovered the in depth prison background of the jailhouse informant, which referred to as into query the person’s integrity.
“He just did all of that groundwork on his own from his jail cell, with nothing but paper and stamp,” Runnels stated.
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner believed Johnson was harmless. But her efforts to assist him had been blocked when the Missouri Supreme Court, in March 2021, dominated that Gardner lacked the authority to hunt a brand new trial 28 years after the conviction.
Missouri lawmakers, disturbed that an harmless individual may stay in jail on the technicality that an excessive amount of time had handed since his conviction, handed a legislation enacted in August 2021 that enables prosecutors to request a listening to earlier than a decide in circumstances of potential wrongful conviction. That legislation freed one other longtime inmate, Kevin Strickland, in 2021. He had served greater than 40 years for a Kansas City triple-killing.
Some states, together with California and Hawaii, are additionally wrestling with how you can deal with wrongful conviction circumstances. In California, Attorney General Rob Bonta is organising a fee to overview prison circumstances for doable wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project’s web site says that throughout the U.S., it has helped free or exonerate greater than 240 folks, 58 per cent of whom are Black.
The overwhelming majority of their purchasers had been exonerated by DNA proof.
Now, Kidd is a public speaker who additionally works with prosecutors to assist them keep away from convicting harmless folks. He hopes Johnson will be part of him in his effort. What Johnson chooses to do subsequent as a free man is unclear.
“I think we can move the needle, prevent wrongful convictions in the first place and help extricate more individuals on the back end,” Kidd said.
Johnson said he’s thankful to be free, even if he’s unsure what the future holds.
“It’s exciting and a little intimidating,” he said. “I have to go out there and learn, and survive, and get my life back in order.”
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Source: www.9news.com.au
