the Department of Corrections to give Marsha full credit for the time she’d served before she was finally freed in December 2012 after ten years of wrongful imprisonment.
We had started holding annual benefit dinners each March in New York City to raise money for EJI. We usually honored a luminary in public service and a client. We’d previously honored Marian Wright Edelman, the heroic civil rights lawyer and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. In 2011, we honored retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. I had met Justice Stevens at a small conference when I was a young lawyer, and he had been extremely kind to me. By the time he retired, he’d become the Court’s most vocal critic of excessive punishment and mass incarceration. In 2013, along with Marsha Colbey, we decided to honor the charismatic former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Elaine Jones, and the progressive ice-cream icons Ben (Cohen) and Jerry (Greenfield). Roberta Flack, the legendary singer and songwriter, agreed to perform. She sang the George Harrison tune “Isn’t It a Pity” before it was time to present our award to Marsha.
In my introduction, I told the audience how, on the day of her release from Tutwiler, Marsha had come to the office to thank everyone. Her husband and her two daughters had picked her up at Tutwiler. Her youngest daughter, who was about twelve, had reduced most of our staff to tears because she refused to let go of her mother the entire time she was in the office. She clung to Marsha’s waist, kept hold of her arm, and leaned into her as if she intended never to let anyone physically separate them ever again. We took pictures with Marsha and some of the staff, and her daughter is in every shot because she refused to let her mother go. That told us a lot about what kind of mom Marsha Colbey was. Marsha took the podium in her lovely blue dress.
“I want to thank all of you for recognizing me and what I’ve been through. Y’all are being very kind to me. I’m just happy to be free.” She spoke to the large audience calmly and with a great deal of composure. She was articulate and charming. She became emotional only when she talked about the women she’d left behind.
“I am lucky. I got help that most women can’t get. It’s what bothers me the most now, knowing that they are still there and I’m home. I hope we can do more to help more people.” Her gown sparkled in the lights, and the audience rose to applaud Marsha as she wept for the women she’d left behind.
Following her, I couldn’t think of what to say. “We need more hope. We need more mercy. We need more justice.”
I then introduced Elaine Jones, who began with, “Marsha Colbey—isn’t she a beautiful thing?”
Chapter Thirteen
Recovery
Events in the days and weeks following Walter’s release were completely unexpected. The New York Times covered his exoneration and homecoming in a front-page story. We were flooded with media requests, and Walter and I gave television interviews to local, national, and even international press who wanted to report the story. Despite my general reluctance about media on pending cases, I believed that if people in Monroe County heard enough reports that Walter had been released because he was innocent, there would be less resistance to accepting him when he returned home.
Walter was not the first person to be released from death row after being proved innocent. Several dozen innocent people who had been wrongly condemned to death row had been freed before him. The Death Penalty Information Center reported that Walter was the fiftieth person to be exonerated in the modern era. Yet few of the earlier cases drew much media attention. Clarence Brantley’s 1990 release in Texas attracted some coverage—his case had also been featured on 60 Minutes. Randall Dale Adams inspired a compelling, award-winning documentary film by Errol Morris called The Thin Blue Line. The movie had played a role in Adams’s exoneration, and he was released from Texas’s death row not long after its release. But there had never been anything like the coverage surrounding Walter’s exoneration.
In 1992, the year before Walter’s release, thirty-eight people were executed in the United States. This was the highest number of executions in a single year since the beginning of the modern death penalty era in 1976. That number rose to ninety-eight in 1999. Walter’s release coincided with increased