Unraveled: Bearing Witness to Wrongful Convictions Each Week

Eyewitness misidentification has played a role in more than two-thirds of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence. Last week, we heard the stories of lives rebuilt after the fight for freedom was finally won. But what does that fight actually look like from the inside? When you’re the one person in the room who believes, and everyone else is sure you’re wrong. The flashing lights cut through the Dallas night in November, 1976. A police officer, Robert Wood, was dead. Shot during a routine traffic stop. The investigation moved fast, as it always does when a cop is killed.

They had a suspect. A sixteen-year-old drifter named David Harris, who’d been bragging about the crime. But when they cornered him, Harris had a story. A very convincing story. It wasn’t him, he said. It was the man who gave him a ride that night. A twenty-eight-year-old man named Randall Dale Adams. And just like that, the entire weight of the state shifted. David Harris, the actual killer, became the star witness. In exchange for his testimony, he got immunity. Randall Adams, who had a steady job and no criminal record, was now facing the death penalty.

I sat in that courtroom. I watched them put David Harris on the stand. He was just a kid. He seemed believable. Then other witnesses came forward, people who claimed they saw Adams. Their stories were shaky, full of holes the prosecution just papered over. But it didn't matter. You could feel the jury leaning in. They wanted to believe. The pressure to solve the murder of a police officer was immense. And then came the moment. That terrible, theatrical moment that the late Justice William Brennan wrote about. A witness takes the stand… points a finger… and says, “That’s the one.” In that instant, the truth doesn’t matter anymore.

A story has been told. A target has been chosen. Randall Adams was convicted. He was sentenced to death. And for those of us who knew it was wrong, the world just… stopped. The system we were told to trust had swallowed an innocent man whole. Years went by. Appeals failed. Hope was worn down to a nub. And then, something impossible happened. A filmmaker named Errol Morris showed up. He wasn't a lawyer. He was just a man with a camera who thought the official story didn't add up. He started interviewing everyone. The lawyers, the questionable witnesses, and David Harris himself.

He just let them talk. And on tape, the lies began to unravel. Harris, so confident and poised in court, was now almost bragging about how he got away with it. He was practically confessing. The film, The Thin Blue Line, came out in 1988. It wasn't just a movie. It was the appeal we never got. It laid out the whole, rotten truth for the world to see. A judge recommended a new trial. And finally, years after he’d sealed Randall’s fate, David Harris came close to admitting the truth. In 1989, Randall Dale Adams walked out of prison. He had spent twelve years behind bars, many of them on death row, for a crime he did not commit.

He was free. But you don’t get those years back. The case proved that a single, confident lie can be more powerful than the truth in a courtroom. But it also proved that the truth, no matter how long it takes, can be just as powerful in setting a person free. The finger that pointed him into a cell was a lie, but the camera that pointed at the truth… that was his salvation.