Justice Delayed

I was reading a link from Timshel about Bush's Shreveport Hay Ride, when I noticed this story at the bottom of the page:

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Michael Williams insisted he was innocent when he was convicted of rape, then locked up in Louisiana's top security prison in 1981. He was a skinny 16-year-old.

He was released on Friday, 24 years later, after DNA evidence proved him right: He had nothing to do with the rape of the woman who identified him in court as her attacker. Now 40, he left the state penitentiary at Angola for his first day of freedom as an adult.

"I would like to thank God," Williams said at a Baton Rouge news conference after his release.

On his release, the state gave him a check for $10.

Williams is the eighth Louisiana prisoner freed because of DNA testing in the past two years. The last was Ryan Matthews, 24, who was released from death row last August after DNA cleared him of a 1997 murder.

Here's hoping the state will be a tad more generous in the not-too-distant future (IIRC, Williams can appeal to the legislature for a special bill to be written for compensation). As the article makes clear, the young man was subjected to harrowing assaults while in Angola--essentially torture, albeit not specifically at the hands of guards. No, instead, they looked the other way while inmates did the dirty work.

Having gone and watched The Exonerated last weekend, and having seen Burden of Innocence more than once, I'll note for the record that while it's damn good the wrong man is no longer in jail, Mr. Williams's is now proven to be the victim of a crime, too--a crime that lasted 24 years.

The article doesn't mention whether the DNA that exonerated him implicated someone else. Hopefully, the real criminal will be found, tried, and judged guilty. And hopefully Williams will manage to overcome the terrible injustice done to him.