The one thing every wrongful death row conviction has in common is that the jury got it wrong, Herman Lindsey, a death row exoneree, said Saturday at the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty conference in Lawrence.

While recalling the story of his wrongful conviction, Lindsey shared about a corrupt prosecutor and a judge on their first big-time case. But he said the biggest bulwark in the way of those things should have been an attentive jury. In his case, he said, it wasn’t.

Lindsey is the executive director of Witness to Innocence, a Philadelphia-based organization made up of exonerated death row survivors fighting to end the death penalty. 

In 2006, he was wrongly convicted of a murder at a pawn shop that had occurred 12 years earlier. He spent three years on Florida’s death row before being unanimously exonerated in 2009 by the Florida Supreme Court, which said there was not enough evidence to find Lindsey guilty and he didn’t receive a fair trial. 

The Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty is a statewide group with one main mission: to abolish the death penalty in Kansas. Their annual conference on Saturday in Lawrence brought together more than 50 members.

Donna Schneweis, chair of the coalition, kicked off the conference.

“Our membership in Kansas is politically diverse, geographically diverse, religiously diverse, and they are also quite varied in their reasons for wanting the death penalty to end,” Schneweis said.

The conference also included breakout sessions walking through the legislative and legal landscape for the death penalty in Kansas.

Lindsey recalled the story of four pieces of evidence, none placing him at the crime scene. Prosecutors threatened Lindsey’s ex-wife with jail time during her testimony and struck a deal with a convicted murderer to testify that Lindsey had confessed to the crime but later didn’t even recognize Lindsey, he said. 

Prosecutors showed a slip from the pawn shop where the murder occurred and told the jury it was from just days before the murder. But it wasn’t — it was from months before. 

Lindsey said there is a lot of blame to go around, but his biggest call was for jurors to ensure they are attentive and ready to deliver a fair verdict. 

“But the main issue that caused wrongful conviction is the jury got it wrong,” Lindsey said. “I know y’all don’t want to go to jury. But we need good people on jury. It’s so important that we have good people on the jury. Otherwise, if we don’t have good people on the jury, the prosecutor gets to do what they want to do, the judge does what they want to do.” 

Lindsey recalled the feeling when the verdict was read for a crime he didn’t commit. It was the first three words that truly stayed with him: “We the people …” 

“That is a moment I will never forget,” Lindsey said. “Because those particular words took me so much, I feel like it’s my job, my obligation, to educate the people. Because those are the people that he was talking about.”

Kansas’ death penalty is under scrutiny as the ACLU challenges its constitutionality in a Wyandotte County case. Attorneys argue it fosters racially biased juries and violates defendants’ rights to impartial juries. Kansas is among 27 states permitting the death penalty, with nine inmates currently on death row, according to the Kansas Reflector.

Learn more about the coalition on its website, ksabolition.org.

Cuyler Dunn (he/him), a contributor to The Lawrence Times since April 2022, is a student at the University of Kansas School of Journalism. He is a graduate of Lawrence High School where he was the editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper, The Budget, and was named the 2022 Kansas High School Journalist of the Year. Read his complete bio here. Read more of his work for the Times here.

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