By Victoria Valenzuela / Substack
In 1953, Tommy Lee Walker was 19 years old when he was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, executed by the state of Texas less than three years later — but yesterday, the Dallas County Commissioners Court acknowledged his innocence, 70 years after the execution.
There were no witnesses or evidence, but according to the Innocence Project, who served as co-counsel in the case, racial bias was evident. Walker was found innocent of the rape and murder of a white woman, convicted by an all white male jury. The arrest and death sentence came during the Jim Crow erawhen Dallas was racially segregated. The Innocence Project noted that when searching for the murderer, “with no real leads nor any forensic evidence to test, law enforcement rounded up and detained hundreds of Black men for questioning.”
They went after Parker following a statement from a person who was promised money from the police in exchange for testimony. However, Parker had a strong alibi corroborated by 10 witnesses — his girlfriend went into labor that night, and they went to the hospital for his son to be born.
A racist cop coerced Parker to confess. According to the Innocence Project:
“Mr. Walker was interrogated for hours by notorious Homicide Bureau Chief and one-time Ku Klux Klan member Will Fritz and Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, who oversaw 20 proven wrongful convictions of innocent Black men. Over several hours of interrogation, officials lied to Mr. Walker about existing evidence and threatened him with the electric chair. Under unimaginable pressure, Mr. Walker signed two written “confessions.” The first included factual inaccuracies that made the confession implausible. The second, which Mr Walker signed and then immediately recanted, was “fixed” by police to fit the details of the crime.”
False confessions were present in 25% of all exonerations. In murder cases, incentivized witnesses were present in 50% of exonerations. He was also identified by two witnesses after his image was widely publicized in the media as the “confessed killer,” who claimed to see Walker near the victim’s place but were not present at the time of the crime. According to the Innocence Project, which also reported eyewitness misidentification was present in 63% of their cases.
In a press release from the Innocence Project, Lauren Gottesman, one of Mr. Smith’s Innocence Project attorneys, noted:
“We now know, through decades of research and wrongful convictions, that the tactics used against Mr. Walker — threats of the death penalty, isolation, and deception, as well as the blatant racism in this case, increase a person’s stress and mental exhaustion, placing them at significant risk of falsely confessing during police interrogation. Nearly a third of all wrongful convictions that are uncovered with DNA evidence are the result of false confessions — far from an anomaly. We’ve seen that play out in countless cases like those of the Central Park Five — now known as the Exonerated Five — and the Englewood Four.”
At the time of his trial, Walker had legal support from an NAACP attorney and had a thousand people outside the courthouse trying to prevent the execution of an innocent man, according to the Innocence Project.
The current fight for justice was led by Walker’s son, who was a baby at the time of his execution. He worked with the Innocence Project, Dallas County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, and the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern University School of Law for years to get the posthumous pardon, which is very uncommon.
In the press release, the Innocence Project included a quote from Walker’s son, Edward Smith, who only met his father once as a two-year-old:
“It was hard growing up without a father. When I was in school, kids talked about their dads, and I had nothing to say. This won’t bring him back, but now the world knows what we always knew — that he was an innocent man. And that brings some peace.”
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Victoria Valenzuela
Victoria Valenzuela is an independent journalist in Los Angeles covering social justice. She has a master’s degree in specialized journalism with a focus on investigations from the University of Southern California. She has been published in more than a dozen outlets including BuzzFeed News, Truthout, Guardian, Documented, The Appeal, Prism, Waging Nonviolence, and Ms. Magazine. Her Substack, focused on prisons from a family point of view, is https://victoriaevalenzuela.substack.com