Dallas County commissioners voted unanimously to declare innocent a Black teenager convicted of rape and murder in 1954.
District Attorney John Creuzot, at times dabbing his tears, led the argument for the posthumous exoneration on Jan. 21.
Tommy Lee Walker was 19 when he was accused of the rape and murder of Venice Lorraine Parker near Love Field airport, though that night, Sept. 30, 1953, he had been attending the birth of his first and only child at Baylor hospital.
Walker was sent to the electric chair in 1956.
That son, Ted Smith of Dallas, wept, stamped his foot and slapped the podium while addressing commissioners.
"I'm 72 years old and I still miss my daddy," he said. Because my mother said, she told me — this had to be pounded in my head each and every time, and it even drove her to drinking heavily — she said, 'Baby, they gave your father the electric chair for something he didn't do.
"It hurts every time I talk about it because I miss my father. I miss him dearly. It's been 70 years," Smith said.
Smith was 2 when his father was executed.
"Raising your kids is one of my biggest priorities because my father never got a chance to raise me," Smith said.
Creuzot said he is responsible to bring justice to victims and the accused.
"This responsibility transcends the notion of time," he said. "If it is discovered that an injustice was done to either of those parties, the victim, the accused, the people, even if, as it so happens in this instance, I myself was not yet born, it is my duty to make every effort to right the wrongs of the past and facilitate healing between the families, the community, and the criminal justice system."
Joseph Parker said he believes his mother's real killer has been punished.
"Street justice has a handle on taking care of people that do things that are not appropriate," he said. "And even though there was nobody truly arrested, convicted, etc. I suspect that whoever did it was taken care of. If not in this life..."
Records show that a Dallas police homicide detective, Capt. Will Fritz, had claimed that Venice Parker said — just before dying from a slashed throat — that a Black man was her attacker. One of the presenters at Wednesday's meeting said Fritz had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Four months later Walker was arrested for her murder.
The posthumous exoneration originated from a years-long investigation by journalists Mary Mapes and Mark Wrolstad into Walker’s case and Parker’s murder.
"If nothing else comes from this is that we learn to try to not make the same mistake," Joseph Parker, of Houston, said Wednesday. "The mistake being the injustice. The taking of an innocent life."
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 county's resolution those violations include "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 Mary Mapes in 2016. Mapes had written a story about the case for D Magazine.
Walker 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 turned loose."
Commissioner Theresa Daniel reflected on the case after Wednesday's vote.
“How can you have a justice system that is based on tricking someone to confess to this kind of situation?” she said.
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