Baltimore’s City Board of Estimates recently announced that they’ll be giving $48 million to three men who were wrongly arrested and convicted for a murder they didn’t commit.
In a recent gathering on Wednesday, the board voted yes in a 5-0 decision to the payout proposed last week. Tracked to be the highest payout in the history of the state, Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart and Ransom Watkins will each receive approximately $14.9 million while their law firm who represented them will receive $3.3 million.
The men were wrongfully arrested as teenagers in 1983 for the murder of 14-year-old DeWitt Duckett. The then-16-year-old boys decided to visit their former middle school in November 1983 and, after visiting their past teachers, were locked out of the school at 12:45 p.m. after security led them outside.
Thirty minutes after they were sent outside, DeWitt was approached by someone who demanded his Georgetown Starter jacket, taking the jacket and fatally shooting him before fleeing the scene.
Nothing in this world can make up for the mental and emotional trauma that has been put on these innocent men and their families. No amount of compensation can right the wrongs of 36 years of turmoil and the residual effects on these men, their families, and communities. pic.twitter.com/4cVcdBI7Ip
— Office of Baltimore City Council (@BaltCouncil) October 18, 2023
Although later records note that witnesses said 18-year-old Michael Willis was seen leaving the school with the handgun and DeWitt’s jacket, lead detective Donald Kincaid targeted Chestnut, Watkins and Stewart, accusing the three because Chestnut also had a Georgetown jacket of which his mother had a receipt for.
The three, known as the “Harlem Park Three,” were all convicted and sentenced to life at the age of 17. An investigation by the state later found that witnesses were coerced by the police to send the three to jail.
Although numerous appeals failed, Chestnut continued to push for freedom and, in 2018, after he submitted a public records request and the records identified Willis as the murderer, the three men were released from prison in November 2019 as men in their 50s.
“Today our city paid a moral, ethical, and financial debt left on us by a previous generation and decades of injustice,” said the President of the Board of Estimates Chair and City Council, Nick J. Mosby, in a statement. “No amount of compensation can right the wrongs of 36 years of turmoil and the residual effects on these men, their families, and communities.”
The Harlem Park Three are three of thousands of people who have been wrongfully convicted by the U.S. justice system. Per a 2022 report by the National Registry of Exonerations, the amount of people who have been convicted but have later been proven innocent has increased substantially by approximately 70% in the last five years.
According to the researchers, race was a factor in a majority of these wrongful convictions. Analyzing the cases of the 3,200 people who were exonerated since 1989, they found that Black Americans were seven times more likely to be convicted of serious crimes they didn’t commit.
When wrongfully convicted, Black people were also more likely to spend more time in prison than wrongfully convicted white people.
With now over 3,400 exonerations identified, over 30, 250 years have been lost due to wrongful convictions in the U.S.
