didn’t much like speaking in public. Politicians would sometimes say provocative things—
such as that his exoneration just proved the system works—which irritated and angered me.
My own speaking would sometimes take on an edge of combativeness. But Walter remained
calm, jovial, and earnest, and it was very effective—watching Walter tell his story with such
good humor, intelligence, and sincerity heightened the horror our audiences felt, that the
State had been determined to execute this man in all of our names. It was a compelling
presentation. We spent a good bit of time together, and Walter would occasionally share with
me that he was still troubled by the cases of the men he’d left behind on death row. He
thought of the guys on the row as his friends. Behind his gentle presentations, Walter had
become fiercely opposed to capital punishment, an issue he readily admitted he had never
thought about until his own experience confronting it.
A few months after winning his freedom, I was still nervous about Walter’s return to
Monroe County. The big feast immediately following his release had brought hundreds of
people to his home to celebrate his freedom, but I knew that not everyone in the community
was overjoyed. I didn’t tell Walter about the death threats and bomb threats we’d received
until he was free, and then I told him that we needed to be careful. He spent his first week
out of prison in Montgomery. He then moved to Florida to live with his sister for a couple of
months. We still talked almost every day. He’d accepted that Minnie wanted to move forward
without him and seemed mostly happy and hopeful. But that didn’t mean there were no
aftereffects from his time in prison. He started telling me more and more about how
unbearable it had been to live under the constant threat of execution on death row. He
admitted fears and doubts he hadn’t told me about when he was incarcerated. He had
witnessed six men leave for execution while he was on the row. At the time of the executions,
he coped as the other prisoners did—through symbolic protests and private moments of
anguish. But he told me that he didn’t realize how much the experience had terrified him
until he left prison. He was confused about why that would bother him now that he was free.
“Why do I keep thinking about this?”
He sometimes complained of nightmares. A friend or a relative might say something about
how they supported the death penalty—just not for Walter—and he would find himself
shaken.
All I could tell him was that it would get better.
After a few months, Walter very much wanted to return to the place he’d spent his whole life.
It made me nervous, but he went ahead and put a trailer on property he owned in Monroe
County and resettled there. He returned to logging work while we made plans to file a civil
lawsuit against everyone involved in his wrongful prosecution and conviction.
Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no
assistance, no counseling—nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them. At the time
of Walter’s release, only ten states and the District of Columbia had laws authorizing
compensation to people who have been wrongly incarcerated. The number has since grown,
but even today almost half of all states (twenty-two) offer no compensation to the wrongly
imprisoned. Many of the states that do authorize some monetary aid severely limit the
amount of compensation. No matter how many years an innocent person has been wrongly
incarcerated, New Hampshire caps compensation at $ 20 , 000 ; Wisconsin has a $ 25 , 000 cap;