Dallas County commissioners are expected to vote next week on a resolution declaring that a Black man executed more than 70 years ago was wrongfully convicted.
Tommy Lee Walker was 19 when he was accused of the rape and murder of Venice Lorraine Parker near Love Field airport in 1954.
A review by the District Attorney's office Conviction Integrity Unit, with the Innocence Project and Northeastern University School of Law's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project found "egregious violations of his constitutional rights," according to the proposed resolution, including a coerced confession that Walker later recanted.
According to the proposed resolution, those included "his arrest without probable cause, his interrogation without the assistance of counsel, the denial of a jury representative of his peers, the suppression and misrepresentation of material evidence, and the use of a confession now recognized as unreliable under modern scientific and legal standards..."
The conviction "occurred during a period in Dallas and throughout the United States marked by racial segregation, systemic injustice, and inequality' within the criminal justice system," the resolution reads.
Think host Krys Boyd discussed the case with journalist Mary Mapes in 2016. Mapes had written a story about the case for D Magazine.
He maintained his innocence in a video clip from WBAP, which later became NBC5 KXAS. The video can be viewed on the University of North Texas Libraries' Portal to Texas History.
"I feel that I have been tricked out of my life," he said. "There's a lot of other people who have been convicted for crimes they committed and was turned loose. I haven't did anything, and I'm not being trying to loose."
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