Randek Dale Adams (December 17, 1948 - October 30, 2010) is a former American prison convict who was falsely convicted of the November 28, 1976 murder of Texas police, Dallas, Robert W. Wood and sentenced to death. His conviction was canceled in 1989.
Throughout his ordeal, Adams maintained his innocence. He insisted that the man he believed to be the killer of Wood, David Ray Harris, had offered him on the day of the shooting after his own car ran out of gas. Adams and Harris spent several hours together but had parted ways before filming. Under an immunity agreement, Harris testified to the prosecution that Adams was a Wooden Shooter as he became a passenger. Based on Harris's testimony and other alleged witnesses, Adams was found guilty by the Dallas County jury and jailed in jail. In 1980, his sentence was changed to life imprisonment.
While jailed for crime, Adams was the subject of the 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line, cited as instrumental in his release the following year. Writer-director Errol Morris knows that Harris, on many occasions, brags about shooting a police officer. He then found evidence of prosecution errors and misidentification of eyewitness accounts. During an interview with Harris, Morris was able to record audio from him giving pseudo recognition to Wood's murder. In 2004, Harris was executed with a deadly injection for unrelated 1985 murders. He was never charged for the murder of Robert Wood.
Six months after the film's release, Adams's conviction was overturned by the Texas Court of Appeals Court and the prosecutor refused to try the case again. Adams has not received compensation from the State of Texas for the 12 years he spent in jail. He died of a brain tumor on October 30, 2010, at Washington Court House, Ohio.
Video Randall Dale Adams
Early life and education
Adams was born in Grove City, Ohio, the youngest of five children from a woman named Mildred and a miner who died of a mine's pneumoconiosis. Adams graduated from high school in 1967, and spent three years as a US Army paratrooper.
Maps Randall Dale Adams
Assassination assassination
In October 1976, 27-year-old Randall Adams and his brother left Ohio for California. On the way, they arrived in Dallas on Thanksgiving night. The next morning, Adams was offered a contract job. On the following Saturday, November 27, Adams started working but nothing came up because it was a weekend. On the way home, his car ran out of fuel.
David Ray Harris, who had just turned sixteen, passed Adams in a car he had stolen from his neighbor in Vidor, Texas, before driving to Dallas with his father's gun and rifle. Harris offers Adams a lift. Both spent the day together, where they drank alcohol and smoked marijuana. That night they went to a drive-in movie, where they saw The Student Body (1976, directed by Gus Trikonis) and The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974, directed by Jack Hill).
That night, Robert W. Wood, a Dallas police officer, was working on a grave shift with his partner Teresa Turko, one of the first female police officers in Dallas to be assigned to a patrol job. Shortly after midnight on November 28, Wood stopped Harris's stolen car at 3400 blocks of North Hampton Road because the car's lights were not on. As Wood approached, he was shot twice in the forearm and chest by someone in the car. The vehicle darted almost immediately after the shooting, allowing Wood a little time to react; He then testified that he had fired on the escaped vehicle but to no avail.
The Dallas Police Department's investigations brought back to Harris, who, after returning to Vidor, had bragged to his friends that he was responsible for the crime. Harris was arrested but, when interviewed by police, accused Adams of the murder. Harris leads the police to a car driven from the crime scene, as well as a.22 caliber revolver handgun that he identifies as a murder weapon.
Trial
Dallas prosecutor Douglas D. Mulder demanded Adams with crime, despite evidence against Harris, apparently because Harris was a teenager at the time and Adams, as an adult, could be sentenced to death under Texas law. Adams testified that after leaving the drive-in film, Harris dropped Adams at his motel, where Adams and his brother watched TV and then went to bed. He claimed to not be in the car when the shootings occurred. Harris testified that Adams was not only in the car, but also the driver, as well as the Wood Officer.
Testimony by Harris and some questionable eyewitnesses - including Emily Miller and R.L. Miller, who claimed to have passed the vehicle stopped Harris immediately before the shootings - led to Adams's confidence. Texas forensic psychiatrist James Grigson (a.k.a. "Dr. Death") was also a witness to the prosecution. After giving Adams psychiatric evaluation, he told the jury that Adams would be a continuing threat if it continued to live. As a result of this testimony, Adams was given the death penalty. His conviction was unanimously endorsed by the Texas Court of Appeal in 1979.
Years later, in 1995, Grigson was issued by the American Psychiatric Association and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians for unethical behavior.
Changing the death penalty
Adams's execution was originally scheduled on May 8, 1979, but US Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. ordered to stay only three days before the scheduled date. In 1980, the Supreme Court on 8-1 vote ruled unconstitutional the requirements of Texas for the jury to swear that the mandatory penalty of death sentence would not interfere with their consideration of factual matters, such as guilt or innocence, during the trial. As a result of the decision, Adams's death penalty was canceled and Texas Court of Criminal Court gave him a new court. Before the trial could begin, however, Texas Governor Bill Clements converted Adams's sentence into life imprisonment at the request of the Dallas District Attorney.
Exoneration
In May 1988, David Ray Harris, at the time he was a prisoner in jail, admitted that Adams was not even in the car on the night of the murder. The release of the documentary in August 1988 The Thin Blue Line, detailing the many inconsistencies in prosecution reasoning, further doubts the injustice of Adams, but the case remains in legal limbo.
In 1989, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals at Ex Adeards Adams revoked Adams's beliefs on the basis of irregularities by prosecutor Douglas D. Mulder and inconsistencies in the testimony of a key witness, Emily Miller. The appellate court found that prosecutor Mulder rejected Emily Miller's statement to police who doubted his credibility and also allowed him to give false testimony. Subsequently, the court found that after Adams's lawyer found a statement in Adams court, Mulder lied to the court that he did not know the whereabouts of the witness. The Texas Criminal Court of Appeal stated that "beliefs are unfair especially since prosecutor Doug Mulder." Mulder had returned to the practice of civil law in Dallas in 1981. After the appeals court decision, the case was returned to Dallas County for retrial, but the district prosecutor's office decided not to adjudicate the case again on a period since the original crime, and Adams was later released.
Despite being imprisoned for twelve years, Adams did not receive compensation from the State of Texas. It is said that if Adams has been proven guilty under current Texas law, he will be entitled to receive $ 80,000 for each year of detention. Also, when his convictions are discarded, the wrong prisoner is punished can receive a $ 25,000 payment at once if pardoned by the governor. However, since Adams was released because his case was dismissed, and not because he was forgiven, he did not receive payments from the state after his release.
David Ray Harris
David Ray Harris had testified at the beginning of the trial that he was a passenger in a stolen car, that he let Adams drive, and Adams did the murder. He retracted this testimony at the Adams Habesas corps hearing, but never admitted a mistake in the rule of law and was never prosecuted in this case. On June 30, 2004, Harris was executed with lethal injection for the unrelated Mark Mays 1985 killing in Beaumont, Texas, which occurred during the attempted kidnapping of Mays' boyfriend.
Claim
After being released from prison, Adams ends up in a legal battle with Errol Morris, director of The Thin Blue Line, on the right to his story. This issue was resolved out of court after Adams was given the only use of anything written or made about his life issue. Adams said on the matter: "Mr. Morris feels he has exclusive rights to my life story... I do not demand Errol Morris for money or percentage of the Thin Blue Line, even though the media describes it as such. "
Morris, on his part, recalled: "When he came out, he became very angry at the fact that he had signed the deliverance giving me the right to his life story and he felt as if I had stolen something from him Maybe I do not understand how it seems to be in jail all the time, because of a crime you did not commit.In a sense, the whole crazy deal with the release was triggered by my relationship with his lawyer.It's a long and complicated story, but I think when people get involved, there's always chaos at some place. "
Activism and private life
While in prison, Adams earned a correspondence course from Lee College in Baytown, Texas. Adams later worked as an anti-death penalty activist. He wrote a book about his story, Adams v. Texas, published in June 1992. In 2001, at an anti-death legislative session on behalf of the Texas Moratorium Network, Adams said:
The man you saw before you was here by God's grace. The fact that it took 12 and a half years and a movie to prove that I am innocent must frighten everyone in this room and, if not, then it scares me.
In 1999, Adams married Jill Fratta, the sister of a death row convict.
Death
Adams died of a brain tumor at Washington Court House, Ohio on October 30, 2010, at the age of 61 years. He lives quietly divorced from his past. According to his lawyer, Randy Schaffer, the death was only reported locally and was not reported more widely until June 25, 2011.
See also
- List of freed death penalty convicts.
- The list of false beliefs in the United States
References
External links
- The Story of Randall Dale Adams from Northwestern University Law School Center on Wrong Violence
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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