Letter's sincerity, DNA sample helped Williams

By Beth Warren, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 24, 2007

From his prison cell, a man mistakenly convicted of rape picked up the only weapon available to him in his attempt to break free: a pen.

It took a while for Willie Otis "Pete" Williams' neatly penned letter, written in 2005, to make its way through prison security and into the hands of defense lawyers at the Georgia Innocence Project.

The lawyers get a lot of similar requests -- about 2,600 since taking their first case in Georgia four years ago. The project's aim is to free innocent people in jail by using advanced methods of testing DNA that were not available when the person was convicted.

When Williams' heartfelt words reached the eyes of the nonprofit's executive director, attorney Aimee Maxwell, she felt his plea had merit.

In his two-page appeal for help, Williams, now 44, made it clear from the first sentence that he still insisted he was innocent of a 1985 rape: "I was wrongly convicted for a crime I didn't commit ... I have been incarcerated for 20 years."

But he also didn't portray himself as an angel. He wrote: "I'm a black man with no money and a criminal record."

Those words gave Maxwell reason to think he might be telling the truth.

"It made us feel good about him, that he wasn't hiding anything from us," she said.

Williams' letter detailed an all-too-common problem now well-known in judicial circles: mistaken eyewitness identifications. Maxwell, an attorney for 20 years, said she knows of five other men wrongfully convicted of rape in Georgia whose convictions were based on flawed eyewitness identifications. Those convictions were later overturned because of advances in DNA testing.

"Human memory is fallible," she said.

While reading Williams' letter, Maxwell saw something else that would make it possible for project members to get involved in his case. The DNA used as evidence against him for the 1985 rape in Sandy Springs was available for retesting.

About 60 percent of the letters prisoners write to the Georgia Innocence Project aren't pursued because of a lack of scientific evidence. In some cases, DNA samples that might have established innocence with advanced tests have been lost or destroyed over the years.

Law school student Cliff Williams, who has spent months working on the Willie Williams case as a program volunteer, said he and others already believed someone else was guilty of the rape even before the DNA test confirmed their beliefs.

"It's just a great feeling," said the intern who has the same last name as the wrongfully convicted man. "It's amazing he's going to be able to walk out the doors a free man."

Staff writer Jeffry Scott contributed to this article.