Chapter Thirteen

Recovery

Events in the days and weeks following Walter’s release were completely unexpected. The
New York Times covered his exoneration and homecoming in a front-page story. We were
flooded with media requests, and Walter and I gave television interviews to local, national,
and even international press who wanted to report the story. Despite my general reluctance
about media on pending cases, I believed that if people in Monroe County heard enough
reports that Walter had been released because he was innocent, there would be less resistance
to accepting him when he returned home.
Walter was not the first person to be released from death row after being proved innocent.
Several dozen innocent people who had been wrongly condemned to death row had been
freed before him. The Death Penalty Information Center reported that Walter was the fiftieth
person to be exonerated in the modern era. Yet few of the earlier cases drew much media
attention. Clarence Brantley’s 1990 release in Texas attracted some coverage—his case had
also been featured on 60 Minutes. Randall Dale Adams inspired a compelling, award-winning
documentary film by Errol Morris called The Thin Blue Line. The movie had played a role in
Adams’s exoneration, and he was released from Texas’s death row not long after its release.
But there had never been anything like the coverage surrounding Walter’s exoneration.
In 1992 , the year before Walter’s release, thirty-eight people were executed in the United
States. This was the highest number of executions in a single year since the beginning of the
modern death penalty era in 1976. That number rose to ninety-eight in 1999. Walter’s release
coincided with increased media interest in the death penalty, triggered by the increasing pace
of executions. His story was a counternarrative to the rhetoric of fairness and reliability
offered by politicians and law enforcement officials who wanted more and faster executions.
Walter’s case complicated the debate in very graphic ways.
Walter and I traveled to legal conferences and spoke about his experience and about the
death penalty. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled hearings on innocence and the
death penalty a few months after Walter’s release, and we both testified. Pete Earley’s book
Circumstantial Evidence was published a few months after Walter was freed, and it provided a
detailed account of the case. Walter enjoyed the travel and the attention, even though he