The Innocence Files (2020) s01e06 Episode Script

[man] Sound has speed.
- [woman 1] Rolling.
- [woman 2] Speeds.
[woman 3] Janet, take me back to 1984.
What memories stand out for you?
[Janet] It's funny.
I have a really good memory
for remembering birthdays,
and names, and shopping lists.
I remember Ronald Reagan was president
in '84.
I remember driving an old Thunderbird
that my parents had helped me purchase.
You know, I often refer to my brain
as a filing cabinet.
I am just trying to dig through
those filing cabinets in my brain.
But, you know, I'll be very honest.
There's really so much of '84
[woman in video]
Happy new year, America!
[Janet]that I tried to
not remember.
[woman] Memory has always been, really,
the cornerstone
of the criminal justice system.
Whether it be an eyewitness to a crime,
or a police officer who's describing
their recollection of an event.
Really almost as far back as we have
a criminal justice system,
the testimony of individuals
has always been very important.
[man] It was long believed that
there was nothing better than having
an eyewitness in terms of evidence.
[woman] Research shows that
a confident eyewitness
during their trial testimony
is extremely persuasive.
That kind of important moment
that we all think of
from television programs and movies
when the eyewitness,
almost in slow-motion,
outstretches the hand
and points to the defendant and says
Yes, sir, that's him standing right there.
And I seen him with my Mayella.
Could you point him out for me,
please, ma'am?
They sitting right there.
But from the perspective of a memory
and eyewitness identification researcher,
it really is just theater.
[opening theme music playing]
[man] Richmond's the former capital
of the Confederacy.
There's a street in the city of Richmond,
Monument Avenue,
that has five statues
dedicated to Confederate leadership.
Those monuments, for some people,
represent heritage.
On the other hand, they represent trauma
for other people.
And it casts a long shadow
over cities like Richmond.
[Janet] In the early '80s in Richmond,
safety issues became something
that was really stressed with children.
I remember being taught
in physical education
that if you are ever attacked or raped,
that you should make sure
you remember your attacker,
you know, make sure you remember
all the details so you can tell police.
And so I do think it became
more of a focus for me.
Between 1982 and 1983, Richmond begins
to see a spike in violent crime.
Between 1983 and 1984,
the murder rate in the city of Richmond
rises by 22%
[man] The murder rate is climbing
and drugs are the reason.
[woman 1] Police did record a 38% increase
in rape, and an 11% jump in assault.
[woman 2] People are scared to attend
night meetings or activities
for fear of being robbed
or for fear of being mugged.
[Julian] A lot of that had to do
with the segregationist policies
that compressed African Americans
into these impoverished communities.
And as work began to dry up
in the late 1970s and the 1980s,
what were once poor
but working communities
were now poor, unemployed communities.
And this increases the paranoia
of the white community.
[Janet] I had just finished up
my associate's degree
at community college.
I was working at a childcare program.
I was 20 years old,
and I had the whole world in front of me.
It was the first day back
after the winter holiday.
I was living at home with my parents
and was driving into work
like a normal day.
It was pretty quiet.
Especially at 6:30 in the morning.
I parked in the back parking lot
behind the church,
entered in through a door
that went down a long hallway.
Turned on the lights,
walked down the hallway,
went into the office
and that's when I noticed
that there was a note on my desk.
I had just finished reading it
when I heard, um, a sound.
[muffled noise]
[Janet] I walked out into the hallway
to see what was going on.
I saw a black male
walking down the hallway
with a knife in his hand.
I immediately thought
we were being robbed.
Then as he got closer to me,
he raised the knife to my throat.
He began to take my clothes off
and he attacked me.
When you're in the middle of a rape
you've lost control over that moment.
I wanted to make sure
that I got every bit of information
that I could possibly get.
I remembered jeans, a bulky coat.
He had on a ski mask,
but it was open-face,
so I could see his complete face,
but could not see the hairline.
I purposely looked to where
he fell on the door frame
so I would know how tall he was.
I tried to look at his face
as much as I possibly could.
I felt confident that
I would be able to
identify him at a later time.
I was on one of the teams
in trying to help develop a suspect.
Mostly I was assigned to the black areas.
My supervisor who trained me
was Sergeant N.A. Harding,
and he was the lead investigator
on that particular case.
[Harding] Physical evidence has been
recovered which relates to this crime,
and anybody that has any information
regarding this subject,
we would most definitely appreciate
them calling,
notifying us as soon as possible.
There is a pattern
of five separate crimes
that happened between January 3rd, 1984
and February 1st of 1984,
all in this tiny area
of Richmond and Henrico County.
They took place less than a mile apart.
First, there was the rape of Janet,
then came the oral sodomy of Amy
in a parking lot on January 21st.
After that, on January 27th,
was an attempted abduction of Susan,
and that was followed on January 30th
by the rape of Beth.
And then finally, on February 1st,
there was an attack on Kelly.
The attacker is African American.
The women are all white.
He usually used a knife.
The attacks were early in the morning
or in the early evening hours
just after work.
[man] The person who committed the crime
is at large,
and they probably pose
the greatest threat to society.
[man 2]
At the time, I was in the homicide unit
working on another case.
But with serious cases,
they're gonna know about it.
Everyone's gonna know about it
at the office.
When he approached the women,
he would always talk to them.
You know, "Don't scream.
I've used this knife before,
so I'll use it again if I have to."
So he was progressing it to a point
where we were really getting scared.
[Det. Woody] You got the chief of police
saying, "What are we doing?
What have we got? Who is the suspect?"
Then you got the family of the victim
saying, "What y'all going to do?
Another one happened two weeks
but a couple blocks down the street.
Y'all not doing anything.
Just riding around in your cars,
drinking coffee and eating doughnuts.
What would you do
if it was your neighborhood?"
So, it's a lot of pressure.
It was a lot of pressure, yes.
[woman] A series of assaults
in the city's East End
prompted meetings areas
with residents requesting
beefed-up police security.
We're trying to get a psychological
profile together of this person,
and we don't have a whole lot to go on.
[man] People wanted to bring some closure,
not just to get a serial rapist,
but, if you will, to get a black rapist
of many, many, many white women.
And that doesn't mean to say that
the investigation or the investigators
were racially motivated.
It's just hard to sanitize
all of what happened of race.
I had received phone calls at my job
stating that there were other women
that had been attacked,
and they were so thankful
that I was working with police.
So, I had started to feel a sense of,
"I need to do this.
I need to do this so it doesn't happen
to anybody else."
[clock ticking]
[Janet] I would drive myself crazy
at the fact that I feel like,
that morning, I missed a sound.
I feel like I should have heard something.
[clock ticks]
[Janet] I would drive myself crazy
trying to listen
intensely to make sure that I heard
everything if I was home by myself.
You'd lay in bed and you would just
intensely listen
[water drips]
because you didn't want
to miss anything.
[water drips]
[Janet] There were flashes,
waking up from a dream,
if I'd smell a smell
I'm not sure if it was the cologne
that he wore.
I remember somebody
pulling a knife out at a dinner,
and I'd have a flashback.
Every day when I left the center,
I would take a different route home.
I would take a long route home,
I would take a short route home
in case that somebody was
looking for me and trying to follow me.
It was very hard to do that
day in and day out.
I remember the police calling
and saying that
they had a suspect in custody,
and that they would like
to come show me pictures.
And so I was at the center.
Told the police to come right on over.
It was during nap time,
so the children were asleep.
And so I went into a different room
and sat and looked at the pictures.
I remember seeing a picture
on the first page that
I was 100% percent sure
that that's who had attacked me.
The things that were going through
my mind in that moment were,
you know, he threatened me,
he threatened my family.
Did I really want to press charges?
But I felt certain
that I saw his picture on the first page.
And I finally told the detective,
"Yes, I saw the person,"
and I pointed to the picture
of Thomas Haynesworth.
I grew up with my mother, my father,
my three sisters and my brother.
We had a lot of friends
in the neighborhood,
a lot of kids in the neighborhood.
It was a nice place to live.
[woman]
Tommy was just like any ordinary kid.
He was into himself, doing his own thing.
If he's not sitting in the front
with our pet dog Frisky,
he's in the bedroom recording songs
off the radio on a cassette.
[Thomas] You know, I didn't venture
too far out from school, back home,
hang out with friends,
go round the corner,
play football and come back home,
and that was it.
He's an 18-year-old African American kid
in Richmond who's never been arrested,
never had any run-ins with the police
of any kinds.
One day, he's going to buy sweet potatoes
for his mom for Sunday dinner.
And that's when he was seen by Susan,
the third victim.
She called the police and told them
he looked like her attacker.
[Thomas] Left the house and
I was walking, police stopped me.
He asked where I was going,
I said to the store.
And he told me a lady's house
was broken into
and she could describe the person.
"You mind staying here until,
you know, we go get the victim?"
I said, "I don't mind."
And then by that time,
they brought ten more police cars.
The whole street was full of cars.
And people come out looking,
like, "What this guy do?"
They went and got the victim,
she came back from the opposite direction.
They took her out of the car,
she looked at me,
and like she wasn't too sure,
she looked at me a second time.
She looked like she wasn't too sure,
then the third time.
They said something to her,
and then she looked at me
and she threw her hand up like, "Okay."
Then they came and said,
"You're under arrest."
And that was basically how it all started
that morning.
Just a routine walk to the store.
[man 1] Right now, at this very moment,
as you watch these light rays
striking the magnified eye,
similar tiny beams of light
are entering your own eyes,
and it's by our eyes that we're able
to gain a great part of our knowledge.
[man 2] When I witness an event,
that event comes to me
in the form of light
that's refracted by the crystalline lens
in the front of the eye.
Those signals are then carried up
to the rest of the brain.
Perception is ascribing
some sort of meaning
to the sensory information
that we've acquired.
And the only way we can do that
is to take into account context,
what are the things we know to be true
about the world?
I could give you a situation
in which there are a lot of unknowns,
and then I explain
what those unknowns are to you,
and then you might perceive
that differently.
Take, for example,
an image that first appears to be
a nonsensical collection of dots.
Then if I told you to look for
the dalmatian under the tree,
you'd never be able to see it
as random dots again.
Once our brain has connected two things,
it's very difficult to disconnect them,
even when presented with new facts.
This is especially significant
when we're connecting a face to an event.
[man 3] Faces are processed differently
than other objects.
Instead of processing
the eyes, and the nose, and the mouth,
it's processed all at once as a whole.
But for most objects,
we see individual characteristics
of that object,
which explains why it is
that if you invert a face,
people have trouble recognizing that face,
more so than if you take an object
and invert it.
So, even when you get a good look
at the person,
that doesn't mean you're going
to be able to identify that person.
But there's a lot of pressure on
eyewitnesses to make an identification.
[man] I was covering the series of rapes.
Ultimately, five women shown mugshots
identified Thomas
as the attacker.
It was pretty standard practice
to show the victims the photos
as a simultaneous presentation,
showing the photos at the same time.
It's like a multiple choice test.
The other victims picked him out.
As far as sexual assault investigations go
back in 1984,
that's it.
[Frank Green] Prior to DNA coming along,
these cases were based pretty much
only on eyewitness identification
and blood typing,
but a large percentage of the population
could have fit that same blood type.
So, Thomas was then indicted
on the charges.
You have women who are absolutely certain
that Thomas Haynesworth is the man
who attacked them.
If they can prove this,
Thomas goes to prison for his entire life.
[Thomas] When I got down to jail,
they brought me some more warrants
for four more victims.
What can you do at 18,
and you're facing all these charges?
People say, "You can get the death penalty
behind something like this."
They were saying things just to scare me,
but, you know,
they didn't have to do that.
I was already terrified.
[Janet]
I met with a commonwealth attorney.
They wanted me to go first
since they felt like the ID was
concrete.
If they could get a conviction,
then they could bring the conviction
in to the other cases.
The day of the trial,
I remember being scared to death.
Standing in front of the courtroom,
they brought Thomas in.
As soon as I saw him,
I began to fall apart.
I remember Thomas,
he looked like a deer in headlights.
Uh, just completely lost.
He was just a kid. I mean,
so was the victim. They were both kids.
[man] I just left prosecuting
and started a law firm.
And I was doing
whatever walked in the door, basically.
I had no desire to emphasize
criminal defense work,
but they started sending me
their criminal cases.
So, by default,
I became a criminal defense attorney.
I represented Thomas.
He was appointed to me.
I knew nothing about his case
other than what the warrants said.
I think I had about 30-something warrants.
Robbery, abduction, breaking and entering,
rape, sodomy, intent to defile.
Some things I didn't understand, you know.
Some things I had to ask my mother
what the definition of this is.
I was like, "Y'all got the wrong person."
You know, "I ain't
That's not me.
I don't do nothing like this."
My defense was
this is a case of mistaken identity.
They had picked the wrong person.
And I just thought that's what it was.
[Thomas] He told me just go in there,
and sit up straight and stay focused.
[scoffs] It's hard to sit focused.
You're nervous, you know,
and you're terrified.
Your life's on the line.
You might be going to penitentiary
for the rest of your life.
I know his family testified
on his behalf.
He had a pretty good alibi.
He was at home that morning,
woke up around 10:00,
as he usually did,
and he remembered that day,
and his mom remembered that day
'cause she was finally taking down
their Christmas tree.
[Shawn]
His primary alibi witness was his mom,
which is completely normal
and also terrible,
because who's the person
who would lie for you? Your mom.
And it's very easy for prosecutors
to exploit that.
[Thomas] They got a search warrant,
went through my mother's house.
They ain't find no gun,
ain't find no knife, or nothing.
The only thing they had going
were her words against my words,
my alibi that I was at home
and her testimony
that I was the perpetrator.
That's the only thing they ever had.
When they wanted me
to talk about the attack,
um, they had to have me be specific
about what he did.
And I just wasn't [clears throat]
I just wasn't sure that I could do it.
It just felt like I was reliving
the experience all over again
in front of a hundred people.
[Frank] I don't believe I've ever,
in all the trials I've covered,
seen where they actually
suspended proceedings
so the witness could go collect herself.
[Janet] I pulled myself together.
I remember them asking me
if the person was in the courtroom
that had attacked me.
I remember saying yes.
I remember pointing to Thomas.
I'm absolutely 100% sure that's him.
[Thomas] She pointed straight at me
and said, "That man right there."
I'm sitting at the defense table,
and I'm looking at her and saying,
"Oh, Lord, I'm not the one."
Then the prosecutor said, "Are you sure
that's the man that raped you?"
She looked at me pointing and said,
"I am positive."
Then the prosecutor said, "How do you know
that's the man that raped you?"
And she said,
"He got a face I'll never forget."
[Det. Woody]
When I came on the police department
working in the neighborhood,
I remember Thomas was just a playful kid
that was smiling all the time.
I knew his family,
and I never had any problems with Thomas.
He wasn't one of the ones on the list
that was considered to be a troublemaker.
When his name came across the desk,
I told Sergeant Harding
that he was a good kid, you know,
I just didn't
I can't see him doing anything like that.
And I remember talking
to some of the folks,
saying alibi witness
and things of that nature.
I told my sergeant,
I don't think he was the one.
But the victim had
positively identified him
as being the one
that actually raped them.
Oh, what do you do?
That's the system.
That's the system.
[woman]
A jury deliberated for about four hours
before finding Thomas Haynesworth guilty
of raping a 21-year-old worker
at a church-sponsored daycare center.
Haynesworth still faces charges
in three similar cases
in Richmond and one in Henrico County.
[Thomas] I couldn't believe what happened.
I had my head down, you know,
thinking, "Why me?
Why'd this happen to me?"
But I still think,
even throughout the Janet case,
there was hope that I can beat
some of these charges in the other cases
that I was going to face
and going up against
because they never had no evidence
that placed me at the scene of the crime.
[Shawn] Susan, the victim who saw Thomas
walking to the store that day
and then called the police,
it turns out that her case
never went to trial.
It could be that she never really did get
a good look at her attacker after all.
In Amy's case,
Thomas was acquitted of all charges.
The jury lacked enough confidence
in the evidence to make a conviction.
[Thomas] Once I'd been found guilty
on the rape charge,
then if you get up there to testify again,
when the prosecutor asks,
"Have you ever been convicted of a rape?"
I gotta say yeah.
Then the jury looking at you, "Okay,
he's been already convicted of a rape,
then why not he ain't do this rape?"
It's basically the same case with
a different victim over and over again.
And now it is much, much harder
to represent somebody
with a prior felony record.
This is a bad situation.
[Ramon] We went through eight months
of hell together.
I was more convinced than ever
that he was an innocent man.
But there was no way to put it
into evidence,
and I failed him and his mom.
[Frank] Ultimately,
he was convicted of three rapes,
and he was sentenced
to a total of 74 years.
I think there was a feeling
that we had finally got
a known serial rapist off the street.
[Thomas] I went in age of 18.
My name been drug through the mud,
my character had been assassinated,
and I'm in a place where I did nothing
to put myself there.
First day you step in prison,
I remember getting off the bus,
guys are whistling and saying things
to you, "Fresh meat, fresh meat."
You know, it was terrifying.
The guys look at rapists
and child molesters,
you're the lowest of the bar
of the institution.
Guys don't wanna have
nothing to do with you.
They got this notion that what you did
to others should be done to you.
You lay in your bed at nighttime
and you hear the echoes,
and you got time to think about yourself.
I just barely started living, you know?
You're here for 80-something years, man.
You know
I'm gonna die here.
There's times
when I even questioned myself.
What are the odds of five women
being wrong?
Did I did something that I can't recall?
Was I sleepwalking?
When everybody's pointing fingers at you
and talking about you,
"You did this, you did this,"
then you try to say, "Is they right?"
After the trial, I remember
people coming up to me and saying,
you know, "You've done the right thing."
You know, "Thank you for coming forward."
There was a letter that was given to me
by one of the TV stations
commending me on coming forward.
I carried that letter with me
in my wallet for years.
That was my source of courage,
you know, that I had done the right thing.
Um
That I had made a difference.
[sighs softly]
I thought I had, anyway.
[Frank] After Thomas was arrested,
there was another series of rapes.
The perpetrator started telling victims
that he was the Black Ninja.
[Det. Stem] He would say,
"I don't care if you call the police.
You can call the police.
If you do, tell them
it was the Black Ninja that raped you."
[Frank] The words "Black Ninja"
just took off.
[man]
Officials are warning women to stay alert
for the so-called Black Ninja rapist.
[woman1] Police believe the so-called
Black Ninja rapist
is responsible for 12 attacks.
[woman 2] The victim claims her assailant
identified himself as the Black Ninja.
[Det. Woody] You got the police saying,
"We got somebody else out here.
You know how people are.
They like to copycat.
They see this going on on TV,
and they see this going on,
so now we got another rapist out here."
[woman] Authorities have been questioning
and re-questioning rape victims.
They want to be sure that they have
the right person
when they make their move.
He often struck in the morning.
He targeted white women.
He more often than not used a knife.
The MO was so similar to the MO
for the Haynesworth offenses.
But this notion that
this is yet another incident
of black men preying on white women
was probably an easier jump than,
"We might have gotten the wrong guy."
[indistinct chatter]
[Julian] By the 1980s,
many of the beliefs that were inherent
to the Jim Crow system
outlived the Jim Crow system itself.
And one of those is this belief in
hypersexualized African American manhood.
It begins to shape the ways
that we think about rape.
It begins to shape the way
we think about interactions
between white women
and African American men.
There's no way to remove
that nearly hundred-year long history
from law enforcement
and from people not being able
to differentiate between black faces.
[Thomas]
We talked to Detective Harding.
I said, "Man, if I'm the one
that did these crimes, man,
why are they still being committed?"
Detective said, "Well, I don't know,"
he said. "But we know we got you."
I even gave him a person of interest
I thought who did it, you know. I said,
"You need to check my neighbor out.
Check Leon Davis out."
On January 3rd, before I got locked up,
it was my niece's birthday party.
I came outside to take a little break.
And Leon Davis caught my eye
because he was limping.
And I asked, "What's wrong with you?"
And he told me he got chased
by these white boys.
He was messing with a white girl,
and he fell and hurt his leg,
and, you know, he got away.
And one of the victims at my trial,
she got in court and testified
the same thing,
that the guy chased this perpetrator,
he fell and got up and ran away.
So, I kind of put two and two together.
But at that time, I was already in prison,
so when I told the detective about it,
he said, "No, we got you.
We got the right person."
And, you know, this is my word,
fell on a deaf ear.
[Frank] Whether they looked into
Leon Davis or not, I don't know.
I know I didn't listen
when he wrote me a letter.
I know that sounds terrible to say,
but I would get a dozen letters a week
from inmates,
a number of whom you know,
would say they were innocent,
but, God, there was no way
I could look into them all.
It has to be incredibly frustrating
to be in that position.
During that time period,
I was still in a state of
trying to rebuild my life.
I was very much,
"I'm not going to let this stop me."
You know, "This person's not going to take
everything away from me."
I had to take control of my life back.
But even after I felt like I had healed,
I had begun to have my family,
I married my husband and had children
I think it was just a different
It was a different me
and a different normal.
After the media found out that
we were having a problem with a rapist,
a gentleman and his wife
saw an individual
walking behind a woman.
They didn't feel like it was right.
They called the police,
and that's what led us to Leon Davis.
[Janet] I remembered seeing his picture
after he had been caught,
and I remember having this awful feeling
for the victims
that they mentioned in the article.
I had no
connection to the picture,
his face or anything.
'Cause it was so close
to what I had been through,
but in my brain, it was
"There's another individual out here
that has done this."
I think one of the biggest misconceptions
about eyewitness memory
is that when an event
is extremely stressful or traumatic,
that an individual is much more likely
to be accurate
in their recollection
and in their identifications that follow.
But the research suggests
that they are more likely to make errors.
It's not particularly important
to remember the details of a person's face
when an individual is in fear
for their life.
They engage in what we call
weapon focus effect.
It's more important for many witnesses
to look at the weapon,
to make sure it's not pointed at them
or coming towards them.
And so therefore,
the identification accuracy is decreased.
[Sandra Haynesworth] The family was lost.
It was like it was a dream.
We gotta wake up from this dream.
We filed appeals, but
my appeal process never went to court.
And they tell me, your appeal been denied.
Ramon Chalkley, my lawyer, told me,
"You know the deck is stacked
against us, right?"
When we talked to Tom, I could hear it
in his voice, you know, the scaredness.
He's down there with rapists, murderers.
We didn't know what to do.
At my parole hearings,
they asked me what happened.
I'd just tell them,
"Look, I was falsely accused.
I didn't do nothing."
They said, "That's what you gotta say?"
What can I say?
He said, "I'll tell you what to do.
If you go ahead and commit
that you committed these crimes,
then we'll consider you for parole."
I said, "No, I'm not gonna confess
to something I didn't do."
[Sandra] My ma, it took a toll on her
to see her son locked up for rape.
It was kind of like a weird feeling,
you know,
to come and see one of your loved ones
behind bars.
But as time went on,
Mom said that coming down there,
she couldn't take it no more.
And that was a sad day right there.
Hmm.
Yes, it was.
[Thomas] You'd be, like, "You know what?
It's hopeless," you know what I'm saying?
It's just, like, blow after blow.
It just devastated me
to the point that I didn't care
about nothing after that, you know?
I was just hoping that somebody
would realize they made a mistake.
[man] Senator Patrick Leahy
has introduced a bill
that would make DNA testing
available to all inmates
who claim it could prove their innocence.
[Gary L. Wells] DNA exoneration cases
started showing jurisdictions
that they had convicted
an innocent person.
This was a shock to the system.
I mean, no one had really shown,
in any kind of definitive way,
that there were innocent people
who were in prison.
[woman]
Following breakthroughs in DNA technology,
attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld
created the Innocence Project
to exonerate those
who have been wrongly convicted.
When the Innocence Project first began,
there were many prosecutors who believed
that it was okay to use DNA to convict,
but it wasn't okay
to use DNA to exonerate.
I represented Marvin Anderson.
He was convicted also
in a cross-racial rape in Virginia.
In Marvin's case,
we've tried for years to get DNA testing,
but they kept saying the evidence
had been lost or destroyed.
Finally, I asked the head
of the state laboratory
to pull the technician's notebook
out of the archives.
And he called me up shocked that,
in fact,
the technician had Scotch taped
the swabs from the rape kit
into her notebook.
[man 2] Clerks discovered that
now-deceased lab technician
Mary Jane Burton,
known as the office pack rat,
had scrupulously saved thousands
of shreds of evidence from pre-DNA days
just in case they might be needed again.
[Peter Neufeld] The testing was done,
Marvin was exonerated.
As a result of the whole experience,
Governor Warner then said,
"You know, this is crazy.
How many other innocent people are there
where the evidence has been saved
in notebooks?"
And eventually he ordered a audit.
[man] Mark Warner ordered the test
in potentially thousands of other cases
because, he said, new science demands it.
One by one,
the boxes are being pulled out,
the old files dusted off,
and the tiny bits of cotton cloth
and smears tested
to see if justice was really done.
[Thomas] I was in the cell one day,
and me and my cell partner
were looking at the news,
and I knew my case fall in that bracket.
And I knew I had to do something,
and I started writing letters.
Write, write, write. Just write
to anybody who would listen to me.
Anybody who I could just get my letter to,
I would just write.
Then one of the inmates said to me,
"Man, you're wasting your time.
I done that, been there."
He almost discouraged me.
I said, "You know what?
How can you sit in the system
when you know something you didn't do,
and sit back and do nothing?"
So, I kept pushing on.
The forensic science lab
sent me a letter
and disclosed the letter said that,
"We have found
DNA in one of your cases
that is up for testing."
He had gotten notification
that his DNA was going to be tested,
and so he wrote to me.
My reaction was,
"I need to jump on this right away."
And I think about two weeks later,
they sent me the result
of the testing of the DNA,
and it came back, like,
one in one trillion.
"You are not the person
who committed this crime."
Now, I looked at it, you know
Just, "Finally!" You know, "Thank God."
That letter,
I read that letter about a hundred times.
And on top of the letter,
it had a black mark-out,
the person's name that perpetrated,
but they scratched the name out.
You can't see it.
And I didn't have to see,
but I know who it was.
Leon Davis.
My mother calls me and she said,
"There's two Richmond City detectives here
that need to speak with you."
The two detectives began
to talk about DNA.
They were talking
about the governor having DNA tested,
and all this information
that made no earthly sense to me
why they were talking to me about this.
And then they said,
"Your DNA kit
from your rape was retested,
and it appears that Thomas Haynesworth
is not your attacker."
And I just remembered
sitting there thinking
"What do you mean? I picked him.
I paid attention
to what his face looked like.
I paid attention to where he fell
on that door frame."
But as things began to roll in,
and especially when they said
the DNA has matched Leon Davis,
I couldn't deny that.
And then when I began to read
the other cases of Leon Davis,
I began to connect different things.
And then I said,
"Why didn't somebody catch this?"
[Frank] Everything clicked,
and I thought, "Oh, my God!
How did this happen?"
I feel bad that I didn't recognize,
covering both trials,
how similar the crimes were.
We dug through our files,
and read back reports,
and looked at things that
See what did we miss?
I mean, how do you
excuse the fact that we
put a man away
when he was innocent?
So, that's definitely an injustice.
Something broke down.
[Shawn]
In Janet's case, the key piece of evidence
was Janet's identification of Thomas
as her attacker.
By the time she did look
at the photo array
that included
Thomas Haynesworth's picture,
she had already looked
at two previous photo arrays
and didn't pick anybody out.
But according to Janet,
the third time,
she's told an arrest has been made.
So, in her mind,
the police have got the guy
and her job is to pick him out.
[Det. Stem] Well, if that's true,
I just think that's too suggestive.
Now she feels like
she has to pick somebody out.
"He's telling me
The police are telling me
that the suspect is contained
in this lineup."
It puts, I think, undue pressure
on your victim on that case.
Part of what kept me going
was knowing that I had prevented this
from happening to someone else.
[inhales deeply]
And what actually had happened
I had not done that.
[sniffles]
I had put other people at risk,
and I had put the wrong person
behind bars.
I got it wrong.
Wow.
This is the trick question.
You're sneaky.
Okay.
I'm holding in my hand
two pictures of two black males
um, from Virginia State Penitentiary.
And one is Leon Davis
and one is Thomas Haynesworth.
[Det. Woody chuckles]
I still believe, like I did then,
to me,
that they do not look alike.
I believe the two are very similar
in appearance.
Um
Leon's face is a little bit more
on the round side than Haynesworth.
It's kind of, like, elongated
compared to Leon.
I'm shaking now. It's like
[Gary] I don't think there's much doubt
that the cross-racial nature
of the Haynesworth case played a role.
It is easier to recognize someone
if they're of your own race
than of another race.
Science confirms that.
[Michael Herring] I would have no trouble
distinguishing Thomas from Leon.
But we know
that all of Davis' victims were white.
So, you have to add
the additional complication
of cross-race identification.
[Jennifer Dysart]
Research shows we are less likely
to make accurate identification decisions
of those individuals.
That really has nothing to do
with racism or prejudice,
but instead might be
the way in which the brain
automatically processes
faces of people from other groups.
I mean, they don't look
They're not close at all.
Right?
I mean
Wow!
There is a resemblance
between the two men.
The complexion is different.
The most notable to me is the nose.
The hair lines aren't dissimilar.
The noses aren't dissimilar.
They appear to have
pretty much the same shade of skin.
The noses do not look the same,
the eyes don't look the same,
the hairline is not the same.
And it's thought that much
of this cross-race effect
comes about through perceptual learning.
That if we live in
a racially homogeneous environment,
you don't have much exposure
to people who are of a different race.
You haven't had much opportunity
to discriminate the subtleties
of the facial features
of those people of a different race.
I understand a little better
how the women
mistakenly identified Thomas.
There is a strong resemblance.
I just don't see it.
[Shawn] Discovering the DNA evidence
in Janet's case
was a huge breakthrough for Thomas,
but Thomas was still facing
significant prison time
for the two other rape cases
where there wasn't any DNA evidence.
There are a lot of problems in Virginia
with how these cases are dealt with
because there's this notion that finality
is more important than justice,
and if you create any little remedy,
it's gonna be abused,
there are gonna be
hundreds and hundreds of petitions,
and guilty people are gonna go free.
And I think that is where Thomas' case
became so complicated.
I did not have any sense at the time
how insane the battle would be.
The other convictions were based
on the testimony
of two very confident eyewitnesses,
and without DNA evidence,
it was going to be next to impossible
to overturn those convictions.
We knew Leon Davis had committed all
these other rapes also with the same MO
in the months following Thomas' arrest.
The critical strategic move here
was to build a case
that all the crimes were committed
by the same person.
Having the prosecutor on our side
would have been extraordinary.
That's why we decided
to reach out to Mike Herring.
I wasn't the prosecutor of Haynesworth
in the '80s.
I was the occupier of the office, right?
I was the elected commonwealth's attorney.
So, to the extent that my office was going
to have any leverage on Thomas' outcome,
that buck stopped with me.
But by the time
the governor orders the audit,
you had thousands of cases
that were now subjected
to a new round of forensic analysis.
We got the results of every case
in which there was
preserved biological evidence.
So, I had this stack of them in my office.
There was no infrastructure in place
on how to follow up on the labs.
It was disturbing, it was intriguing,
but more than anything else,
it was confusing.
And so I got the Haynesworth lab,
then shortly after I received the lab,
I got a strange phone call
from the folks at the Innocence Project.
[Shawn] Mike Herring looked
at the files we had and said, "Okay.
I know Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
I actually think
he may be our guy on this."
Um, and we all thought Mike was crazy.
As a conservative in Fairfax,
I was covered
by the Endangered Species Act
- [laughter]
- so I was okay.
[Michael] At the time, Ken Cuccinelli was
a golden child for the Tea Party movement.
He had a national reputation
as being one of the most conservative
attorneys general in the United States.
Normally, you'd be very worried
about having him as your adversary.
But I told him
that I thought we had the wrong guy,
and to his credit, Cuccinelli did not
react defensively to my pitch.
[Ken] Mike and I knew each other
back at UVA, and he said,
"I've got this case, and I think
you need to take a look at it."
I could tell by the way he said it
that he thought in fact
that Thomas might be innocent.
Knowing that one mistake had been made,
and knowing it has been made on the basis
of witness misidentification
certainly leads you
to question the others.
Seeing the overlap across categories
of either behavior, description,
talk that went on, locations,
and so forth,
when you put all those together,
they looked like the same person
with a similar type of attack.
The continuing pattern of evidence
was part of what convinced us
that Thomas had not actually
executed the offenses
that he'd been convicted of.
I think Cuccinelli was convinced
the same way we were all convinced.
After all that, he said,
"There's no question about it,
and I will join you in this petition
to win his exoneration."
Those were unusual steps
and unusual postures
for any attorney general
and, in my opinion,
much less a Republican attorney general.
[Ken] No AG that I know of
had ever sided with a defendant
in the absence of scientific evidence.
And a lot of folks thought,
"Well, isn't that the end of it, then?
Don't you just go tell the court?"
And the answer is no.
You have to prove to the court
that you're over
the very significant threshold of proof.
It is literally proving
the convict was innocent,
and that is a really high bar.
We had to overcome a kind of, um,
you know, scientific illiteracy
that goes along with the notion
that once a woman takes the witness stand
and points to the lone black person
sitting at the defense table and says,
"That's the guy who did it.
As God is my witness,
I will never forget his face."
That's what we had to overcome.
[Shawn] Mike Herring,
Peter Neufeld, Ken Cuccinelli,
the lawyers at Hogan Lovells
and I worked together
as Thomas' kind of unusual dream team.
And we worked for months
to build a case for Thomas' innocence.
What we were able to find in the files
in the Richmond courthouse was Amy's case.
Thomas ultimately was acquitted
in that trial,
but it was an oral sodomy case,
and after she was orally sodomized,
the victim spit on the sidewalk.
And so the swab from that
was what we were able to test.
And once again,
that came back to Leon Davis.
[Michael] That was like a Despicable Me
light bulb moment.
I now had two Haynesworth prosecutions
that were Davis offenses.
[Shawn] The other thing
that really made the cases jump out at me
was the height issue.
All of the victims said
that the perpetrator was 5'9 " or 5'10".
Thomas isn't. He's 5'6".
Leon Davis, 5'10".
[Michael] So, I suggested
that Thomas submit to a polygraph.
The polygraph examiner interviews him,
subjects him to the polygraph,
and comes out and says to me, literally,
"This ain't your guy."
And at that point, I remember feeling
the hairs on my arms
just sort of prickle up.
[Peter] It's extraordinary to think that,
given the evidence
that we had accumulated,
that this would not be a walk in the park.
What we didn't realize is
that our adversaries
were members of the court itself.
[Shawn] When the time came to argue
before the full court, I thought,
"I'm 34.
I've never done an oral argument before."
But Peter was nothing but supportive
when I told him
I wanted to do the argument.
I don't think that Shawn had
any appellate experience at that point.
I don't think
she had any trial experience,
and it was a big responsibility.
But I personally had little doubt
that she was going to be
anything but outstanding.
[Shawn] I was going to compensate
for lack of experience
through insane preparation.
[man 1 on recording] Ms. Armbrust,
you have your two minutes.
[Shawn] Thank you, Your Honor.
Despite the fact
that the eyewitness testimony
says that Mr. Haynesworth
committed this crime,
we have evidence that two victims
mistook Haynesworth for Davis,
only Davis fit the height description
provided by the victims,
that Davis was committing crimes
at that time and in that area,
and that there were idiosyncratic features
of the crimes
that matched to Davis' crimes.
So in this case,
all a jury would be left with
is the certainty of the eyewitness.
Two other eyewitnesses
were equally certain
that Mr. Haynesworth
committed these crimes
and were equally wrong.
[man 2]
Here we have eyewitness identification
that, as far as we know, still stands.
[man 3] In other words, we're exercising
our regional jurisdiction and concessions.
[voices overlap]
[voices continue overlapping]
[man 4] Do we need to get into that level
of specificity in a case like this?
[Peter] The judges started saying things
that were simply irrational.
As far they were concerned,
these two women hadn't recanted
their identifications.
End of argument.
That's That's not judging.
That's rubber-stamping.
[Ken] It was a hot bench.
The judges were all over us.
There was so much questioning
coming from the bench
that you can be answering
judge A's question,
and judge B is already pounding you.
I knew the record backwards and forwards,
by page number,
by, you know, every possible detail
that was in there.
I couldn't blow it.
I needed to do a good job for Thomas.
[Peter] Finally,
after many anxious weeks of waiting,
we've got the opinion of the court.
Six judges felt
that we had met the burden,
and Thomas was at last declared
an innocent man.
It really
It's one of the things I'm proudest of.
Because it was just
that moment where you realize
this guy who's lost his entire adult life
is at least going to have something.
[woman] There's my brother!
[women talk and cheer]
[woman 2] A day of rejoicing
for Thomas Haynesworth and his family.
On his 46th birthday,
he walks out of prison
after 27 years of serving time
for crimes he didn't commit.
I just knew that
I can't spend my life
in prison for something I didn't do.
I always believed
that this day would come.
You've been a good family.
I went to prison at age 18,
and I ain't see the streets
until the age of 46.
Free at last, you know.
I was in shock, taking it all in,
just saying, "I can't believe this."
It's so amazing that, you know,
you've gotta fight for your freedom.
When you get from out a place like that,
you don't take nothing for granted.
I think the first day I was there,
I went to the refrigerator,
and I kept opening it, kept opening it,
and my mom said, "What you doing?"
I said, "I ain't seen one of these
in 30 years."
[cameras click]
- [woman laughs]
- [Thomas chuckles]
- [man] How's it feel, sir?
- [Thomas] Well, man, it feels great.
It's just been a long journey.
I'm just the niece, and I'm happy.
Free at last! Free at last!
[Frank] It was a little overwhelming.
You just get out of prison after 30 years,
there's all this media around you,
all these people
You just want to be with your mother,
your family, your sisters.
He was sitting in a chair,
and he just looked so overwhelmed.
And at that moment,
I felt kind of bad for him.
I was happy for him,
but I felt bad for him, too,
that he had to have been thinking about,
you know,
"Where did Where did my life go?
Where would it have gone
had I not been in prison?
Had I not taken that walk
to the store that day?"
It had to be going through his mind.
[Thomas] They halted my life.
You took my life from me
for almost 30 years.
And it snatched my dreams away,
snatched my life away, you know.
Missed out seeing your parents grow old.
You know, loved ones you lost
in the course of being in prison.
There's a lot of things
that I'll never get back.
[Janet]
When we found out about the exoneration,
I was in a downward spiral for a while,
made bad choices,
and probably drank too much.
It's almost like you've switched roles.
Before, I was a victim.
Now, I've become the person
that caused harm on someone else.
And the guilt and the shame from that
just consumes your soul.
I spent 27 years trying to forget
everything about that time period.
And then you find yourself
trying to remember every single detail
about identifying him, about the attack.
What made me choose Thomas?
What was in my memory
that made me choose Thomas?
And I don't know the answers.
[Jennifer] We know from eyewitness studies
that about one in four eyewitnesses
who views an array
makes a mistake
and picks an innocent person.
Well-meaning, well-intentioned individuals
who really are trying to help.
I think the biggest misconception
that people have about memory
is that it works like a video system.
And it makes intuitive sense.
You know,
the eye is like the lens of a camera.
That anything that comes in through
that lens then is getting recorded,
and then that when you play things back
out of memory,
it's like replay on a camera.
But we know that that is wrong.
The video system
plays the same way every time
The video system
plays the same way every time.
But memory doesn't play
the same way every time.
It's changed ever so slightly.
So, if you have that
kind of video-system belief,
in general, you're going to have
a lot of trust of eyewitnesses.
[Janet] I've been asked by family members,
"Why can't you just let it go?
Why do you want to keep bringing this up?"
And sometimes
it gets really hard to be public
with spreading the word,
you know, helping the cause.
I think you can try to have closure,
but I think it's really important
that you give yourself permission
to feel hurt and to heal.
Sometimes you've got to do the things
that you don't feel 100% comfortable with.
And that's okay.
[woman] To my left is a rape survivor
named Janet Burke
and Thomas Haynesworth,
who served 27 years in prison
for violent felonies he did not commit.
Janet and Thomas,
can you please start sharing,
what do you two learn from each other?
[Janet] There's so much.
Meeting Thomas, for me,
was a huge part of my healing.
But knowing what I did
to this incredible human being
that's sitting beside me,
it's tough.
It's tough.
Every day, it harps on my heart
that I was so sure that it was him.
When I first met her,
I walked in the room,
she just started crying.
And she's apologizing,
she's sorry for what she did, right?
And I just told her, I said, "Well,
you don't need to apologize,
because we both are victim in the system."
[woman] Shawn,
could you jump in a little bit here?
So, I mean, I wouldn't do this job
if I didn't think there were problems.
But I also wouldn't do this job
if I didn't think they could be fixed.
The way we conduct
eyewitness ID procedures,
in most cases,
leads to the thing we saw in your case.
And, you know, unfortunately for Thomas,
it happened multiple times.
I don't think the criminal justice system
will start avoiding these errors
until we start looking at some
of those fundamental issues
and the assumptions we make.
[man] Um, I don't even know
where to start, but I'll do my best.
Thomas, you are the epitome
of a man and godliness.
Like, I'm just blown away
at the level of patience
and everything I see in you.
And it's just amazing.
Give honor where it's due.
[Thomas]
I mean, it was a challenge, you know?
People doubted me,
but it didn't make me bitter or angry
because everybody got an opinion,
but it don't mean your opinion's right.
[Janet] The person's face that attacked me
has always been Thomas' face.
But there really isn't a face now.
And at this moment,
I don't have a need for that face.
I know what that crime did to me.
I know what that crime did to Thomas.
What I know now,
it's the system that's broken.
It's not me.
- [Janet] How did you think it went?
- [Thomas] Went good.
I think you did a good job.
Better than I thought you did.
[Janet] I know.
- We just gotta keep talking.
- [Thomas] That's right.
- [Janet] Keep spreading the word.
- [Thomas] Yeah, it will be fine.
[closing theme music playing]