Ron Williamson

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Ron Williamson (February 3, 1953—December 4, 2004) was a minor league baseball catcher who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 1988 in Oklahoma for rape and murder.

Williamson was the 41st pick in baseball's 1971 amateur draft, a second-round selection by the Oakland Athletics. He spent the 1972 season primarily with the Coos Bay-North Bend A's, hitting .265 in 52 games. In 1973, he had a rotten year, hitting .137 for the Key West Conchs with only 13 runs produced in 59 games.

Ron Williamson Mug Shot

Williamson's life went into a tailspin after that. He became a drug and alcohol addict and suffered from mental illness, becoming depressed and living with his mother. In 1982, Debra Sue Carter, a waitress in an Ada, Oklahoma bar he frequented, was found dead. Williamson along with Dennis Fritz was cited as a suspect by the police five years later on flimsy testimony but was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1988 while Fritz was given a life sentence.

After 11 years on death row, Williamson was cleared by DNA testing, and was finally freed. He died in a nursing home of cirrhosis five years after being freed. Best-selling novelist John Grisham read his obituary in The New York Times and made him the subject of his first non-fiction book, The Innocent Man, published in 2006. The book became a bestseller.