media interest in the death penalty, triggered by the increasing pace of executions. His story was a counternarrative to the rhetoric of fairness and reliability offered by politicians and law enforcement officials who wanted more and faster executions. Walter’s case complicated the debate in very graphic ways.
Walter and I traveled to legal conferences and spoke about his experience and about the death penalty. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled hearings on innocence and the death penalty a few months after Walter’s release, and we both testified. Pete Earley’s book Circumstantial Evidence was published a few months after Walter was freed, and it provided a detailed account of the case. Walter enjoyed the travel and the attention, even though he didn’t much like speaking in public. Politicians would sometimes say provocative things—such as that his exoneration just proved the system works—which irritated and angered me. My own speaking would sometimes take on an edge of combativeness. But Walter remained calm, jovial, and earnest, and it was very effective—watching Walter tell his story with such good humor, intelligence, and sincerity heightened the horror our audiences felt, that the State had been determined to execute this man in all of our names. It was a compelling presentation. We spent a good bit of time together, and Walter would occasionally share with me that he was still troubled by the cases of the men he’d left behind on death row. He thought of the guys on the row as his friends. Behind his gentle presentations, Walter had become fiercely opposed to capital punishment, an issue he readily admitted he had never thought about until his own experience confronting it.
A few months after winning his freedom, I was still nervous about Walter’s return to Monroe County. The big feast immediately following his release had brought hundreds of people to his home to celebrate his freedom, but I knew that not everyone in the community was overjoyed. I didn’t tell Walter about the death threats and bomb threats we’d received until he was free, and then I told him that we needed to be careful. He spent his first week out of prison in Montgomery. He then moved to Florida to live with his sister for a couple of months. We still talked almost every day. He’d accepted that Minnie wanted to move forward without him and seemed mostly happy and hopeful. But that didn’t mean there were no aftereffects from his time in prison. He started telling me more and more about how unbearable it had been to live under the constant threat of execution on death row. He admitted fears and doubts he hadn’t told me about when he was incarcerated. He had witnessed six men leave for execution while he was on the row. At the time of the executions, he coped as the other prisoners did—through symbolic protests and private moments of anguish. But he told me that he didn’t realize how much the experience had terrified him until he left prison. He was confused about why that would bother him now that he was free.
“Why do I keep thinking about this?”
He sometimes complained of nightmares. A friend or a relative might say something about how they supported the death penalty—just not for Walter—and he would find himself shaken.
All I could tell him was that it would get better.
After a few months, Walter very much wanted to return to the place he’d spent his whole life. It made me nervous, but he went ahead and put a trailer on property he owned in Monroe County and resettled there. He returned to logging work while we made plans to file a civil lawsuit against everyone involved in his wrongful prosecution and conviction.
Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no assistance, no counseling—nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them. At the time of Walter’s release, only ten states and the District of Columbia had laws authorizing compensation to people who have been wrongly incarcerated. The number has since grown, but even today almost half of all states (twenty-two) offer no compensation to the wrongly imprisoned. Many of the states that do authorize some monetary aid severely limit the amount of compensation. No matter how many years an innocent person has been wrongly incarcerated, New Hampshire caps compensation at $20,000; Wisconsin has a $25,000 cap; Oklahoma and Illinois limit the total amount an innocent person can recover to under $200,000, even if the person has spent decades in prison.