Texas' Dallas County is poised to say out loud what many Black residents have believed for decades: that the state executed an innocent man in 1956. In a special meeting Wednesday, county commissioners are expected to hear evidence and vote on a symbolic resolution clearing Tommy Lee Walker, a 21-year-old Black man sent to the electric chair for a Dallas murder that new scrutiny suggests he could not have committed, CBS News reports.
Walker was condemned by an all-white jury for the 1953 killing of a white woman near Love Field, a crime with no witnesses, no physical evidence, and a climate of racist fear stoked by the Ku Klux Klan, says Commissioner John Wiley Price. "The Klan was basically rampant here," says Price. "It's not difficult to fathom what happened; they grabbed the first 'Negro' they saw."
Nine people backed Walker's alibi that he was across town with his pregnant girlfriend, who gave birth the next day. Yet Walker was arrested four months after the murder and, according to his account, coerced into a false confession that he immediately tried to take back. "I feel that I have been tricked out of my life," he told the jury following his conviction, maintaining his innocence to the end. "I'm innocent" were said to be his last words, per CBS.
His son, now 72, plans to attend Wednesday's hearing on what could become one of the first posthumous exonerations of its kind. The resolution notes Walker was interrogated without counsel, denied a jury of his peers, suffered "the suppression and misrepresentation of material evidence," and was convicted based on an unreliable confession, per KERA News.
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