He's still struggling to adjust to a world where he feels like a dinosaur. They were among more than 30 survivors of death row gathered Saturday for the first National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty at Northwestern University law school. Carter, now 62, was a prizefighter aiming at the middleweight world championship when he was convicted in 1966 of a triple murder in New Jersey and sentenced to life. He was exonerated in 1985 and now is head of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted, based in Toronto. All wrongful convictions are death penalties, Carter said in an interview.
Prison is death.
Conference organizers identified 73 men and two women released from death row, their cases reversed, since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed rewritten death penalty laws to go back into effect beginning in 1976. No it didn't. And reversals don't impress Randall Padgett, who little more than a year ago won acquittal at his retrial after 5 years facing Alabama's electric chair for the death of his estranged wife. At age 48, he is living with his mother and eking out a living as a chicken farmer in Arab, Ala., after having to sell his house to pay legal bills. Some, like Jones, came to the conference seeking reassurance that their confused feelings were normal.