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Texas admits they executed an innocent person

Last Wednesday, 70 years after his wrongful execution, Dallas County declared Tommy Lee Walker innocent. This was the first-ever posthumous exoneration in Texas, and it underscores the very reasons we must abolish the death penalty.

Tommy was only 19 when police arrested him for the rape and murder of a white woman named Venice Parker. Tommy lived nowhere near the crime scene and had never met Venice.

In fact, at the time of the crime, he had been at the hospital with his girlfriend awaiting the birth of their son. Ten people later confirmed Tommy’s whereabouts.

But it was 1954, and a Black teen’s innocence held little weight in Jim Crow Dallas. A racist police captain — KKK member Will Fritz — subjected Tommy to intense interrogation and threatened him into signing two false confessions. Only three months after his wrongful arrest, an all-white jury declared him guilty and sentenced him to death. Dallas County executed Tommy in the electric chair on May 12, 1956.

Moments before his wrongful conviction, Tommy told the court: “I feel that I have been tricked out of my life.”

He was right, of course. In Wednesday’s resolution, Dallas County stated that Tommy’s entire case — his arrest, interrogation, prosecution, and conviction — was “compromised by false or unreliable evidence, coercive interrogation tactics, and racial bias.”

We don’t have to look far to see that today’s criminal legal system still uses unreliable evidence, coercion, and racial bias to send innocent people, especially Black men, to the death chamber. That is exactly why we are fighting to end the death penalty.

It is our duty to show up for those on death row like the thousands of Black Dallasites who rallied around Tommy after his conviction. To organize like members of the NAACP, YMCA, and local churches who fundraised and petitioned to stop his execution. To bear witness like the 5,000 community members who attended his funeral.

To speak truth to power like Tommy and all those who reinvestigated his case decades later.

In the words of Tommy’s son Edward Smith: “This won’t bring him back, but now the world knows what we always knew — that he was an innocent man.”

Read more about Tommy Lee Walker’s wrongful execution and posthumous exoneration: