"Ex-death row inmate exonerated in prison stabbing," is Bill Draper's AP report, via the Kansas City Star.
Three decades after being sentenced to death for the fatal stabbing of a fellow inmate, Reggie Griffin is officially a free man after a Missouri judge dismissed a murder charge against him.
Griffin, 53, has been out of prison since December while awaiting a new trial in the 1983 fatal stabbing of Moberly inmate James Bausley. On Friday, Randolph County prosecutor Mike Fusselman notified the court that he would no longer pursue that charge because there wasn't sufficient evidence to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
"To not have this over my head is more than what words can describe," Griffin told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "Now that it's over, I'm going to try to put my life back together, to go on with my life."
In the 10 months since an Adair County judge assigned to oversee the case released him on his own recognizance, Griffin has gotten a job and a new wife. He also occasionally speaks to young people about his experiences behind bars, hoping to deter them from making the same mistakes that put him in prison in 1981 for armed assault.
And:
Despite a lack of physical evidence, Griffin was convicted of stabbing Bausley and sentenced to death. He later received a life sentence after it was determined the state wrongly relied on the prior criminal record of another convict with the same name as an aggravated factor in pursuing the death penalty.
Griffin denied his involvement but was convicted after two inmates claimed to have seen him stab Bausley.
One of those inmates later recanted, saying he had not seen the attack and that the testimony he gave at Griffin's trial was not true. The other inmate has died.
An appellate attorney also discovered that prosecutors had withheld a report that guards had confiscated a sharpened screwdriver from another inmate as he was attempting to leave the area where the attack took place.
The Missouri Supreme Court threw out Griffin's conviction in August 2011, saying it was no longer "worthy of confidence."
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Reggie Griffin is the 143rd person who has been sentenced to death and later exonerated and freed. DPIC maintains strict standards for classifying exonerations.
Related posts are in the exoneration and innocence category indexes.
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