Three black men locked away for 36 years for a 1983 Baltimore murder they didn't commit were released on Monday. Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart, and Ransom Watkins were teenagers when they were arrested on Thanksgiving Day that year and accused of killing 14-year-old DeWitt Duckett at Harlem Park Junior High School because they wanted his Georgetown Starter jacket.
“The things I had to go through, it was torture. There’s no other way to describe it,” Watkins said in a news release on Monday. “We held on to each other. That’s what got us through this journey, when we needed each other.”
Detectives targeted the children in 1983 “using coaching and coercion of other teenage witnesses to make their case,” the office of the current State Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby said in the release. Material Brady evidence that could have exonerated Chestnut, Stewart, and Watkins years earlier was kept from the defense and jury. The boys were interrogated without their parents present, and the “smoking gun” in the case was a similar jacket found in Chestnut’s room, even though no blood or gun residue was found on the jacket, and his mom provided a receipt for its purchase.
Two of the innocent men have never before driven a car.
“Today isn’t a victory. It’s a tragedy that these three men had 36 years of their life stolen from them,” Mosby said Monday. “On behalf the State's Attorney office, let me say to these three men, I am sorry. The system failed you. You should never have seen the inside of a jail cell.”
Chestnut, Watkins, and Stewart, now in their 50s, were only exonerated after Chestnut filed an information request this spring after finding the evidence kept from his attorneys during trial. Following the discovery, he contacted Baltimore's Conviction Integrity Unit, the only unit of its kind in Maryland that looks into past convictions.
“I feel like all these years I’ve been saying the same thing,” Chestnut said. “Finally, somebody heard my cry. I give thanks to God and Marilyn Mosby. She’s been doing a lot of work for guys in my situation.”
The state of Maryland doesn’t have a law in place allowing the men to be compensated for their time in jail, but Mosby, a black woman, is advocating to change that. She also announced the launch of the Resurrection After Exoneration program in honor of another wrongfully convicted black man, Malcolm Bryant, exonerated after spending 18 years in jail for a murder he didn’t commit.
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Bryant died just months after his release in 2016, according to the state attorney’s office. The program, a collaborative effort with other agencies, plans to ensure exonerees have the services they need to survive, including mental health, physical health, and education resources.
“It’s time for all of us - prosecutors, the state, and the police - to take responsibility for the wrongs of the past. It’s the only way we can truly move forward,” Mosby said. “As we make strides to reverse mass incarceration, cases like these three men will grow more common. We owe them more than their freedom - we owe them a real support network. The time to start putting that network in place is now.”