randall dale adams

He was 61.

When told that the bullets that had killed Wood matched Harris’s .22, Harris claimed that Adams had fired the gun, and that he had been a passenger at the time. He also did not qualify for the $200 given to prisoners when they are released on parole or on the completion of their sentences. Dr. Grigson, known as “Dr. His death sentence was reduced through appeal to the United States Supreme Court, and eight years later he was released when evidence was … At the time his case was dismissed, wrongly convicted prisoners in Texas could get a lump sum payment of $25,000 if pardoned by the governor. At sentencing, Dr. James Grigson testified that Adams would be dangerous unless executed, and based upon this testimony, Adams was sentenced to death.

Based on the evidence discovered by Errol Morris, attorneys for Adams filed a motion for a new trial in 1988, and at the three-day hearing, Harris recanted his testimony against Adams. Judge Metcalfe scheduled the execution for May 8, 1979.Adams was only three days away from execution when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. ordered a stay. Filmmaker helped free innocent man. A few months after his release, Harris had been convicted in California of kidnapping, armed robbery, and related crimes.After his release from prison in California, and five months after Morris arrived in Dallas, Harris tried to kidnap a young woman named Roxanne Lockard in Beaumont, Texas. Harris had joined the Army and been stationed in Germany, where he had been convicted in a military court of a series burglaries and sent to prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.

The two ended up spending several hours together, smoking marijuana, drinking, and watching porn at a drive-in theater before Harris dropped Adams off at the motel where he was staying. Harris was only sixteen and ineligible for the death penalty; Adams was twenty-seven and thus could be executed.At trial before Dallas County District Court Judge Don Metcalfe and a jury, Turko testified that she had not seen the killer clearly, but that his hair was the color of Adams's. Three weeks later, Adams was released on his own recognizance, and two days after that, Dallas District Attorney John Vance, who had succeeded Wade, dropped all charges.Harris was never tried for the murder of Officer Woods. Sentenced to death in 1977 for the murder of a police officer in Dallas, Texas, Randall Dale Adams was exonerated as a result of information uncovered by film-maker Errol Morris and presented in an acclaimed 1988 documentary, Patrolman Robert Wood was shot to death during a traffic stop on November 28, 1976, by sixteen-year-old David Ray Harris, who framed Adams to avoid prosecution himself. In an effort to prevent the abduction, Lockard's boyfriend, Mark Mays, exchanged gunfire with Harris. Morris’s documentary, The Thin Blue Line, tells the story of Adams’s case. Three weeks later, Adams was released on his own recognizance, and two days after that, the district attorney dismissed all charges. Thus, he said, he was asking Governor Bill Clements to commute Adams's sentence to life in prison. And that's why I'm trying to correct an injustice. But Adams was ineligible because he had not been pardoned.

In the course of his research on Grigson, Morris interviewed Adams, and became so intrigued by his story that he decided to make a film about Adams instead. He now claimed that he had been present at the shooting, but that it had been committed by a hitchhiker he had picked up — Adams.Adams, an Ohio native working in Dallas, was taken in for questioning.

Adams died in 2010 at age 61. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence. A jury convicted Adams of murder. Death." After bragging to friends that he’d killed a cop, Harris was brought in for questioning. But a few days later Wade announced that a new trial would be a waste of money.

As Harris sped away, she shot at his car, but missed. To establish that Adams met that oxymoronic criterion, the prosecution called Dr. James Grigson, a Dallas psychiatrist known as "Dr. Death," and Dr. John Holbrook, former chief of psychiatry for the Texas Department of Corrections.Although the American Psychiatric Association has said on several occasions that future dangerousness was impossible to predict, Grigson and Holbrook testified that Adams would be dangerous unless executed.

When the governor promptly complied, Wade proclaimed that there now would be no need for a new trial. One of these witnesses, Michael Randell, testified that he had driven by the scene shortly before the murder and, in the car that had been stopped by the officers, had seen two persons, one of whom he claimed was Adams. Adams was questioned by the police, and signed a statement detailing his activities on the day of the crime. Randall Dale Adams (17 Aralık 1948 – 30 Ekim 2010) polis memuru Robert W. Wood'u öldürdüğü gerekçesiyle ölüm cezasına çarptırılan ancak daha sonra suçsuz olduğu anlaşılan kişiydi. He shot Officer Robert Wood at least four times, killing him. The officers stopped the car and, as Wood approached the driver's side, Harris shot him five times. Powell was troubled that prospective jurors with moral qualms about the death penalty had been excluded from service, even though they had clearly stated that they would follow the Texas law.To most observers — including, initially, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade (of Roe v. Wade fame) — the Supreme Court's language meant that Adams was entitled to a new trial. Mays was shot to death and Harris was wounded.