Dan, that Instagram post you sent made me pause. The image—him embracing, I assume, his sister—held a weight that I couldn’t ignore. Given the work you’ve done defending the wrongly convicted, I knew this was more than just another headline.
I read into it, and what I found was infuriating. His 1993 murder conviction was vacated after thirty years—three decades stolen. No ruling can restore that time. No apology can undo that loss. And the worst part? He’s not the exception. He’s the pattern. Kirk Bloodsworth, sentenced to death in Maryland, later exonerated by DNA. Gary Gauger, convicted of his parents’ murder, imprisoned for years before the truth surfaced. The system gets it wrong far more often than people admit.
The courts will call it a regrettable mistake. The system will move on. But for him, it wasn’t a mistake—it was a sentence, and it lasted thirty years.
As Voltaire put it, “It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.” But America does the opposite. It rushes to close cases, to assign blame—truth be damned.
This isn’t just another overturned conviction. It’s another man whose life was erased because the system values certainty more than accuracy. And if we don’t demand better, it’ll keep happening. Not because it’s rare. Because it happens all the time.
RMS INSIGHTS ✍🏾 