American Negro / Freedmen Descendant 🪶🪶🪶

He was 34 when he went in and SEVENTY-SIX when he came out. Clifford Williams Jr. spent forty-two years on a Florida conviction for a murder he did not commit. His nephew went in with him on the same case. His nephew did not live to see it overturned. Jacksonville, 1976. Two women were shot in a bedroom; one died. Williams and his nephew Nathan Myers were convicted and sentenced — Williams to death, later reduced to life. The case against them had a hole in it the size of a house. More than forty people had been at a party next door that night, and a great many of them said both men were there when the shots were fired. The physical evidence did not support the prosecution's account of where the shooter stood: the shots had come from outside the window, not from inside the room as the state claimed. And somebody else had confessed. A man named Nathaniel Lawson had told multiple people he did it. He died years later without the system ever treating it as material. No lawyer presented most of this at trial. In 2017 Florida's first Conviction Integrity Review unit, in the Jacksonville State Attorney's office, began looking at it. The review found there was no credible evidence of guilt and considerable evidence of innocence. In March 2019 both men walked out. Williams was 76. Myers was 61. They had been in prison for forty-two years and nine months. Williams said afterwards that he had kept himself going by refusing to stop saying he was innocent, and that he had not expected to be alive when anyone listened. Now the bit that should be in the post and usually is not. Florida has a wrongful-conviction compensation statute. It has a "clean hands" clause — if you have prior felony convictions, you get nothing, however innocent you were of the thing that took your life away. Williams had priors. He was initially denied compensation under that clause, and it took a special act of the legislature in 2020 to pay him.