This Thanksgiving will be extra sweet for three Baltimore men released from prison on Monday after wrongly serving 36 years for a murder they didn’t commit. But will they be compensated for the state taking so many years from their lives?
Alfred Chestnut, Ransom Watkins and Andrew Stewart entered the prison system as 16 and 17-year-old teenagers. Yesterday, they received a writ of innocence in the death of 14-year-old middle school student, DeWitt Duckett. They have always maintained their innocence, according to CNN.
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“That was hell,” Chestnut said to reporters upon release, CNN reported. “That was miserable.”
Last spring, Chestnut contacted Baltimore’s Conviction Integrity Unit after he found new evidence that could have helped exonerate him, Watkins and Stewart.
Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby later joined in on the fight, jointly filing a petition with the men for their release. Yesterday, she apologized to the men for the injustice and told them they were being freed.
“I don’t think that today is a victory, it’s a tragedy. And we need to own up to our responsibility for it,” Mosby said, according to CNN. “There’s no way we can repair the damage to these men, when 36 years of their life were stolen from them.”
“You were all arrested on Thanksgiving 1983. Now you are free to spend the holidays with your loved ones for the first time in 36 years,” Mosby added during a press conference.
On Thanksgiving morning, Chestnut, Watkins and Stewart were arrested for the shooting death of Duckett, who was murdered for his Georgetown University jacket.
The state convicted the three young men based on witness testimony and a Georgetown jacket found in Chestnut’s room – even though his mom produced a receipt and a store clerk testified that Chestnut’s mom had purchased it. Further, the jacket had no blood on it or bullet residue. And like the case of the Central Park Five, the teenage boys were questioned by police without a parent in the room.
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Now the released men are in their fifties – and the state of Maryland has no system in place to compensate the men for their wrongful convictions. Mosby said she plans to push for laws that would pay inmates who are wrongly convicted and that would require a parent to escort underage kids during police interrogations.
Shameful.
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