Randall Dale Adams
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Randall Dale Adams, born in 1949, is a man convicted of a murder he did not commit, whose death sentence was reduced through appeal to the United States Supreme Court, and who was eventually released when evidence was uncovered which proved his innocence. Adams' case is profiled in the documentary The Thin Blue Line.
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[edit] The case
Adams was sentenced to death for the murder of police officer Robert Wood. The crime occurred on November 28, 1976 in Dallas, Texas. Evidence in the case pointed to David Ray Harris, who may have been an unsatisfactory suspect to police because he was 16 years old and under Texas law could not be sentenced to death. At Adams' trial, Harris named Adams as the shooter, and Harris was soon back on the streets. A prosecution psychologist, Dr. James Grigson – known as Doctor Death, having testified in more than 100 trials that resulted in death sentences – told the jury that Adams would remain an ongoing menace if kept alive.
Adams's case came before the United States Supreme Court (Adams v. Texas 448 U.S. 38 (1980) [1]), which overturned his death sentence by an 8-1 majority on the grounds that Texas's jury selection process excluded persons who had objections to the death penalty. Rather than have the case re-tried, Governor Bill Clements commuted Adams's sentence to life imprisonment.
In 1985, a young filmmaker, Errol Morris, came to Dallas to work on a documentary about Grigson. When he met Adams, Morris thought he was an unlikely killer and decided to take a closer look. Morris soon discovered that Harris had been compiling a criminal record of some magnitude. Morris discovered other problems with several witnesses who testified at Adams' trial. David Ray Harris recanted and said in a recorded interview for the documentary that Adams was innocent.
[edit] Exoneration
In 1989, the Court of Appeal overturned Adams' conviction on the grounds of malfeasance by the prosecutor Douglas D. Mulder and perjurious inconsistencies in the testimony of another key witness, Emily Miller. ((Ex parte Adams) (768 S.W.2d 281)) The appeals court found that prosecutor Douglas D. Mulder withheld a statement by Emily Miller to the police that cast doubt on her credibility, and allowed her to give perjured testimony. Further, the court found that after Adams' attorney discovered the statement late in Adams' trial, Mulder falsely told the court that he did not know the witness' whereabouts. The prosecution then dropped charges.
David Ray Harris was later executed on separate charges for the murder of Mark Mays. Adams now works as an anti-death penalty activist.
[edit] Life after release
After Adams' release from prison, he ended up in a legal battle with Morris concerning the rights to his story. The matter was settled out of court after Adams was granted sole use of anything written or made on the subject of his life. Adams himself said of the matter: "Mr. Morris felt he had the exclusive rights to my life story .... Therefore, it became necessary to file an injunction to sort out any legal questions on the issue. The matter was resolved before having to go before a judge. Mr. Morris reluctantly conceded that I had the sole rights to my own life. I did not sue Errol Morris for any money or any percentages of The Thin Blue Line, though the media portrayed it that way."[2]
Morris, for his part, remembers: "When he got out, he became very angry at the fact that he had signed a release giving me rights to his life story. And he felt as though I had stolen something from him. Maybe I had, maybe I just don't understand what it's like to be in prison for that long, for a crime you hadn't committed. In a certain sense, the whole crazy deal with the release was fueled by my relationship with his attorney. And it's a long, complicated story, but I guess when people are involved, there's always a mess somewhere." [3]
At a legislative hearing, Adams said:
| “ | The man you see before you is here by the grace of God. The fact that it took 12 and a half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room, and if it doesn’t, then that scares the hell out of me. | ” |
