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People who were sentenced to death after being convicted of crimes they didn’t commit share moving testimonials about their experiences on death row and life after exoneration. I interviewed Ajamu and others who represent vastly different backgrounds but share a similar, soul-crushing burden: They were sentenced to death after being convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Ajamu was released on parole in 2003 after 27 years in prison, but the state of Ohio would not declare him innocent of the murder for nearly another 12 years, when the boy’s false statement and police misconduct were revealed in a related court hearing. But Cleveland homicide detectives told the boy they would arrest and charge his parents with perjury if he changed his story, according to his later court testimony. It would be publicly revealed 39 years later that the boy who testified against him had immediately tried to recant his statement. Yet mere months after his arrest, the high school junior was condemned to die. Another witness testified that Bridgeman was not on the street corner when Franks was killed. Not a shred of evidence, forensic or physical, connected Bridgeman to the slaying. Ajamu was 17 when he was convicted.Ījamu, then named Ronnie Bridgeman, was found guilty primarily because of the testimony of a 13-year-old boy, who said he saw Bridgeman and another young male violently attack the salesman on a city street corner. Ajamu was sentenced to death in 1975 for the murder of Harold Franks, a money order salesman on Cleveland’s east side. A version of this story appears in the March 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine.Ī 63-year-old man named Kwame Ajamu lives walking distance from my house in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.