After spending 21 and a half years in an Louisiana State prison, Calvin Willis was released in September of 2003. He was wrongfully convicted for Aggravated Rape.
As of April 5th, the organization "The Innocence Project" exonerated 305 men and women that were convicted for crimes they did not commit.
Exonerated means that a person os freed from jail, after being imprisoned for something he/she did not do.
Most of the suspects were put into jail because of misidentification of an eyewhitness. Often times whitnesses think that they have to choose a person from the line- up because the police didn't tell them that the suspect might not be in the line. The eye- whitness then chooses the person that looks most like the person they saw.
Sometimes, the police is even guilty of putting an innocent person into jail because of methods they used.
In class, we listened to a story of a young boy, 14 years old, that was put in jail for killing his sister because he signed a confession after the police interrogated him for 11 hours. He finally signed the contract, even though he didn't do it, because he thought he would be able to go home. Instead, he was locked up in prison.
Back to Calvin Willis's case:
In June 1981, an intruder entered a house in Shreveport, Louisiana where 3 girls had fallen asleep after playing dress- up. Their mother was not home, but when she came home the next morning, she found the evidence of the rape. One of her daughters also had her head being banged against a wall, as well as being kicked in the stomach which caused her to lose consciousness.
She was taken to hospital where a rape kit, such as evidence from fingernails, was taken. The bedspread was also examined.
She described the man as a black man with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat.
Calvin Willis visited the neighborhood before because he used to live nearby and still had friends in the area. The girls had seen him before and also spoken to him.
Police reports of interviews with one of the girls differed.
When the trial happened, she identified Calvin Willis as the intruder. She identified him by his cowboy boots, even though they differed from what she described earlier during interrogations.
Seminal stains were found on the nightgown and identified as stains from blood 0 markers. Calvin Willis also has blood group 0. Blood was found on the boxer shorts that could not exclude the victim. No seminal fluid was detected on the vaginal swab. The boxer shorts must have been the intruder's and were size 40.
As soon as Willis was arrested, he said that he did not commit the crime.
His wife testified that he came home shortly before midnight the night of the crime, while the crime was most- likely committed after 12 am.
She also testified that Willis wore his boxer shorts this night which are size 29!
Willis himself testified that he dropped off a friend and returned home before midnight. His description of the clothes he was wearing that night did not match those described by any of the three girls. In the past, he said, he had been to the house where the crime occurred and all three girls had seen him several times.
The jury did not believe Willis’s alibi so he was convicted in February 1982 of rape and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In 1998, Willis' case was accepted by the organization "The Innocence Project". The DNA from the victim's fingernailes matched the DNA of the seminal fluid in the boxershorts but Calvin Willis was excluded from being the contributer of any of the samples!
On September 18th, 2003, Willis was released from jail, after spending more than 21 years of his life for a brutal rape he did not commit.
While Willis was in jail, he gave his friend Rickey Johnson, also locked up for rape, the address of the Innocence Project. They also investigated his case and it turned out that Rickie Johnson was also wrongfully convicted and finally exonerated in 2008- after spending more than 25 years in prison!
I am glad that we are doing this unit in Biology to learn more about the topic. It also reveals how easy it can be to be locked up forever if the a whitness identifies you as the perpetrator of a crime, on purpose or not. It also shows how messed up the Judiciary system can be!
See Calvin Willis's case on the Innocence Project's website here: Click.
