Sullivan Walter was just a teenager when he was arrested in connection with a rape during a home invasion in New Orleans.
More than three decades later, a Louisiana judge determined Walter, now 53, was wrongfully convicted for a crime he didn’t commit and freed him from prison on Thursday.
The decision by district judge Darryl Derbigny ended the fifth longest wrongful conviction sentence of any juvenile in the US, Nola.com reported, at a time when juvenile sentences, particularly life sentences, are under scrutiny.
The Black man’s conviction illustrated the racial bias that plagues the US criminal justice system and has led Black people to be disproportionately wrongfully convicted of sexual assault, murder and drug-related offenses compared with white people.
A 2017 review of nearly 2,000 cases between 1989 and 2016 by the National Registry of Exonerations found that Black people were significantly more likely to later be found innocent after a conviction.
They were also more likely to wait longer for their names to be cleared. In Walter’s case, like others, race played a role, the Innocence Project New Orleans legal director, Richard Davis, said in a statement to the Associated Press.
“The lawyers and law enforcement involved acted as if they believed that they could do what they chose to a Black teenager from a poor family and would never be scrutinized or held to account,” Davis said. “This is not just about individuals and their choices, but the systems that let them happen.”
Walter’s exoneration came after the office of New Orleans’ district attorney, Jason Williams, a reformist prosecutor recently acquitted of tax fraud, worked with the Innocence Project New Orleans, which investigates wrongful convictions, to file a motion to vacate Walter’s sentence, noting that there were “red flags” throughout the investigation that led to his conviction.
In 1986, Walter, who was 17 at the time, had been arrested for a separate burglary when his photo was added to a lineup presented to a woman, identified only as LS, who was raped that May by a man at her New Orleans home, who also threatened to harm her eight-year-old son.
The woman identified Walter in a photo array. That served as the sole evidence presented at trial that connected Walter to the incident.
Emily Maw, an attorney who works for the district attorney’s office, noted in court “some red flags that the eyewitness testimony could well have been unreliable”, the AP reported.
Prosecutors at the time of the incident failed to show evidence that the seminal fluid matched Walter’s blood. Walter’s previous attorneys also failed to challenge “conflicting statements” made by police officers who investigated the woman’s case.
Following a single-day trial, a judge sentenced Walter to 39 years in prison on rape charges and for an aggravated burglary separate from the case, Nola.com reported.
“In this case, LS was being asked to make a cross-racial identification of someone who at all the times that she could observe him was either masked, in an unlit room at night, and/or threatening her not to look at him,” a joint filing by New Orleans prosecutors and the Innocence Project noted, and the Associated Press reported. “In addition, LS was not shown a photo array containing Mr Walter until over six weeks after the crime,” it added.
From the courtroom on Thursday, Walter brushed the tears from his eyes as he learned of his impending release.
“This is horrible,” the judge, Derbigny, said as he learned what unfolded. “I’m at a loss of words to express the sorrow and the anger I have at the treatment you’ve been dealt by the system.”
After his release from Elayn Hunt correctional center, following an embrace from his two older brothers, Walter told reporters he was “ready to live”.
“I just want to live an honest, free life,” Walter said.
