How I Escaped the Death Penalty (Crime Documentary) | Real Stories

[Music] i want to tell you a story about the first lawyer i ever had [Music] picture a prison visiting room with a glass partition your lawyer comes in off the street through an archway he sits with his back to a brick wall and the first thing out of his mouth he says kirk you're in a lot of trouble he says but don't worry i know my way around the courtroom and i know my way around the criminal justice system and we're going to find our way out of here together [Music] we talked about the case for about 20 minutes or so and right before he gets ready to leave he reiterates what he said in the beginning he says kirk i know my way around the courtroom and i know my way around the criminal justice system we're going to find our way out of here together so he put his hand on the glass to say goodbye he picks up his briefcase turns around and runs right into the wall [Music] it was august 9th at about 2 45 in the morning and i was staying at my cousin's house i left baltimore my first wife and i were having problems and i heard this big boom boom boom at the door it was the baltimore county police and they arrested me for first degree murder of dawn hamilton [Music] i was in a pair of silk running shorts no shoes no shirt and they walked me out in the police car that was the last time i seen cambridge maryland for eight years 10 months and 19 days [Music] it was a tragic murder there's no doubt about it everybody was talking about a little girl there's pictures of the composite on telephone poles and it was on the news every minute my wife was sitting on my lap and we were watching the news together and the composite sketch comes up and uh and she turned around and looked at me and it was like i said what are you looking at me for and she said well it does look like you a little bit [Music] i was just thinking to myself are you mad you know and it was just the most surreal event it was almost like i felt something coming for me it was by any measure a most horrid crime on a hot summer's day in 1984 a little girl is found brutally murdered and sexually assaulted in the woods in rosedale nine-year-old don hamilton had suffered severe head injuries her killer had strangled her by stepping on her throat and she'd been sexually abused with a stick two weeks later baltimore county police arrested kirk bloodsworth a jury convicted him a judge sentenced him to death mr bloodsworth you want to make any statement [Music] i used to work at a newspaper called the star democrat and there was a guy that we were hanging out together and he said look man he said why don't we go up to baltimore on the weekend we went to hammer jacks in baltimore it was this bar that has like triple decker bars and like five bands and it's just like it was all the rave back in those days and he met a friend of his name wanda which turned out to be my wife she jumped in the car and looked at me and said how are you doing and i guess that was the end of me i mean i was i was really strong with her right from the beginning i'm calling her from work you know and stuff and ask her when i see her and i see her and you know in a short amount of time i fell in love i asked her to marry me and so take her to see mom and dad you know and and you know of course my mother was very adamant against it the wanda was a lot older than me you know she was she was 10 years my senior we got married on april uh 14 1984. we were up there taking the vows from the minister and she had took two phenobarbitals it was like you know i i should have knew then uh you know when when she told me she said i can barely stand up and i i literally almost had to hold her standing up it was like crazy and our honeymoon didn't last long i can tell you that she moved down to cambridge with me and she didn't like it she didn't like the watermen's life and she said she had to go home that's how come i was in baltimore because of her the day i was getting married my best man was following me over the bay bridge you know to go to the church that day and i was so hungry man my stomach was just like it sounded like a bear and i was looking around the car for something you know and i looked up on top visor and there was a fortune cookie and i grabbed it and i opened it up with my teeth you know with the bag and it just started biting this thing and pulled out the fortune and just put it in my lap and i was chewing on this thing and i had to grab it and because the traffic was slowing down and i looked at it and it said turn around i should have turned the hell around that table i wound up hitchhiking to baltimore the fourth of july weekend and that's when everything started it's hard to listen to that story about her and not feel some deep empathy for a nine-year-old little girl that was taken away in the most brutal fashion anybody could do i mean the tragedy of that is glaring you know i remember i was looking at some of the newspaper clippings that i was collecting over the years it would be a picture of her and then this picture of these guys carrying this body out of the woods i mean come on i mean anybody in uh and her that had any compassion or her empathy would feel for that child and and then your first instinct is being accused of it is to say wait a minute i don't you know i feel really sorry about that and it's kind of like this it's not dismissive but you know kind of like that's not your priority but it was my priority it was my priority in the sense that you know i'm a human being i have feelings i know that whatever happened to her shouldn't have happened and we have to find out what happened and who it happened with it was my motivating factor to bring her justice not just for myself but for dawn too [Music] on july 25th 1984 nine-year-old dawn hamilton went outside to play hide-and-go-seek she had a sleepover the night before all her friends were out and dawn was it she come across two little boys that were fishing in a pond area called becky's pond she asked him so could you help me find my friends they declined they had just caught this turtle they weren't really interested in that but a man on the rise of a hillary looking down at the scene of the two little woods spoke up with the sun behind his head and said he would help her find her friends 2 30 that afternoon dawn hamilton was found lying face down in a pile of leaves her panties and shorts had been discarded in a tree nearby her body her head had been crushed with what appeared to be a rock there was an imprint of a shoe on her throat the ultimate heart laid upon this little girl this precious little nine-year-old child with a paige boy haircut was what i was accused of i had never been arrested in my life i was honored with discharged marine i was 22 years old of this brutal root of murder and this all started because a next door neighbor called the police and said the composite sketch looks like my neighbor kirk [Music] i really do not go a day and honestly a day without thinking about kirk and what he went through every day that i wake up and i think about what we're doing for case and what we're doing to repeal the death penalty i think about kurt not only because we've gotten to be friends but even before that time because if when you hear his story you'll know exactly why he's in my mind and he's in everybody's mind who actually speaks to him because the story is uh gripping and horroring and just downward amazing in both a negative way and in a positive way come on up her i love you man you know it's very tough for me to come back to a county which tried to sentence me to death but i gladly do it to ask each and every one of you to repeal the death penalty the death penalty is fallible we can get it wrong i have to tell each and every one of you that there is no need to um worry about punishing the worst of the worst if you have to walk over the innocent to do it we can't just yawn at an innocent man going to death row and not just because it's happened to me but you know the legislature and i i have pushed this thing for so many years i think they're really tired of listening to me i don't want it to happen again and it will it will we'll get complacent again and things will happen somebody will go to death row and it'll be too late we can protect this community and others in the state by imposing one of the most toughest sanctions they should sit in a cell for the rest of their life and never have a chance to get out of it and i think being that i've sat in one for nine years people tell you they got tvs and all this happy stuff that's you know that might be true but that is no joke what we have this this report is basically a look at the 2009 law the kirk talks about the innocent piece i think the other other side of it is that we've made it more arbitrary you now seek death based on what evidence you have not the nature of it that's just a fact you have to have dna a videotaped interrogation confession or a videotape of the crime you know there's no question that we've reduced the risk we have not eliminated this kirk says the only you can eliminate is to get rid of the death penalty but i think the flip side of that is the catch-22 everything you do to make the system less air pro is only going to make the wheels of justice grow slower and slower and leave families in limbo are you very good yourself fine thank you i meant to tell you the other day it's really good it's like my trademark you know okay oh my god favorite three oh my god this is our year you think i think it is i think it is hey why don't you do me a favor it's a pretty good word distinguished members of the committee i am kirk bloodsworth most of you know my name and my face for years i urge you to reveal that maryland is definitely in our state for one simple reason human beings are not perfect no one knows this better than being an honorably discharged marine where who served his country with no criminal record and found myself on maryland's death row for a crime i did not commit i sat in a courtroom while the state of maryland brought in witness after a witness who looked at me in the eye and said that i was the one they saw that day the state's attorney called me a monster the jury convicted and the judge sent me to death to cheers across the courtroom in my case i cannot blame corner cutting and errors the late man broke the prosecutor in my case was very smart the judges in both trials were very smart the homicide detectives in my case were very smart by all accounts the true juries i had were smart and concerned citizens of the state but in the end every single person involved in the state of maryland versus kirk noble bloodsworth was dead wrong i'm not ruling out the possibility that mistakes were made i'm ruling out the possibility that we're mistaken as to who did it i am rolling out that possibility absolutely the two main witnesses in the case were two little boys the oldest other two little boys was asked by the baltimore county police department to do a composite sketch not an artist's rendering but a thing called an identicate it's a set of eyes ears noses mustaches jawlines and hairlines and beards and so forth 25 of each facial feature he wasn't really happy with a lot of things he said the eyes were similar but the mustache was different he said the mustache went down like this the younger of the two little boys was trying to do the same thing to make a composite but the police officers what they did they brought the two little boys together in the same room and agreed upon the composite sketch there was another woman she did a composite too didn't match and they threw it in the trash can she took it back out and kept it and came to testify on my behalf they arrest me on a thursday took me in in front of judge whitstad i was all alone and i didn't have a lawyer or anything he said do you have anything to say mr buzzword and i leaned forward i said you got the wrong guy i didn't do this thing and he cut me off he said remember now anything you say we got these tapes rolling and all this i don't care i said i don't i don't care what you got rolling i have anything to do with this well we're going to hold you over for a bail review and you're charged with first degree murder of dawn venice hamilton and he handcuffed me again walked me out and he asked me did i want to put a blanket over my ass for what i don't care if the whole world sees me i ain't doing anything wrong they arrest me on a thursday they don't have this lineup until that monday [Music] and they had called all the witnesses and told them not to watch television we've arrested a suspect and by the way his name is kirk bloodsworth this whole weekend all the witnesses are watching me on television the lineup was held all the witnesses came there were six people in the lineup i was number six i was on the very end and the two little boys never pick me out of the lineup they had one individual identified me by watching me on television and he let him come to the lineup and testify in open court two weeks later i would find out that the two main witnesses the two little boys their parents called the police and said that we made a mistake it was really number six and that's the position i stood in now they had a took this whole case to the grand jury based on witness identification alone and the grand jury indicted me on all counts of first degree murder i became the most hated man in the state of maryland and that was it man it went right straight to hell after that please give this message to ambrose i hope that i spelled it correctly i was on the jury on the second kirk bloodsworth trial the foreman and if it is proper she would please give me give him my apologies since she is able to contact him i know that it's not much but it would make me feel better since i and my peers grow wrong this has defined me this has made me who i am and is always going to be a part of me it's never gonna go away i think about it every day i can't even fathom somebody thinking that i could do something like that let alone me going to death row for it they wanted to kill me they were going to kill me at 23 years of age they were going to kill me in my case they don't even want to look at the other suspects that are in the case because they had me they had several suspects in area they have one guy by the name of kimberly shea ruffler who was let go two weeks before dawn's murder for two attempted rapes of two other little girls there was a police report about him eight days before my arrest they never went back to check there was another guy who was named captain bob used to ride around in a in a panel van and try to get kids to come to the window and give them candy too and there were several several other suspects they never went back to check on a roughner or any of them once they had blood's work that was almost 30 years ago and it's just as vivid and real as it was fresh as the sun when it grows this morning but what are you gonna do you got two choices do nothing and just live some kind of meaningless type of life or stand up do you ever have any hatred against these people or you find peace with god yes i have to tell you man that doesn't do me any good as a human being it will soil my soul if i continue to have hatred against anybody it did anything to me it's what i do with what happened to me now that's the most important thing how i stand up and i choose to do it with grace and dignity as best i can and you know and and not give anybody any quarter because now it's time to work on what the problems would have caused all this to start with and you know instead of burying my head in the sand and saying oh whoa it's me i want to get something done and that's how i live with this thing [Music] now i have to tell you that my my marriage to my first wife was not a fan you know there's an old ronnie dangerfield joke that said that she was an earth sign and i was a water summit together we made mud just moved to baltimore i moved up there on july the fourth weekend of 1984 i was there for 30 days 30 days i lived in a house with seven people i was the only one that had a job and i just couldn't deal with it anymore yeah i was just like man i gotta get out of here i can't stand this life and i'm used to working every day and making good money and we could barely eat you know in this household i think it was the third of august i went and told my boss that i was sick that day picked up my check got it cashed and started hitchhiking back to cambridge i was staying at people's houses rose carson's house for a little bit of time and then i was at my cousin cindy's my parents were gone i don't know where they went but they weren't home and that's where i was gonna stay around august 8th a detective from cambridge police department came to the door of rose carson and said look your wife is following a missing person for you know where you're at now but do you have anything to say well no tell her i'm okay and i feel terrible about what happened you know with her and i when you get arrested they read you your rights anything you say can and will be used to get you in a court of law and they absolutely mean that the day i left i was supposed to take wanda out to get a taco salad taco bell had just come out with this daggone thing and she wanted to get one and i said well when i get paid i'll we'll go out and i'll get you this thing i felt terrible about that and leaving wanda and that's what i told the cop i said i did a terrible thing i left my wife and didn't get her tiger salad and i know it sounds absurd but that's what stuck in my mind i said that in the context that i left my wife you know and but this is the whole thing about anything can and will be used to get you they said that i had said i'd done a terrible thing and my wife and i probably won't get back together because of it i did feel terrible i didn't feel terrible because i had something to do with dawn hamlet's murder i felt terrible how my life turned out my marriage i didn't go take my wife out to dinner these were the things you know and i left it with the bills and i left you know dead i felt bad and felt terrible because i didn't take responsibility at 22 years old i should have you know but that's how i felt terrible but they painted it in the light most favorable to them the next day the baltimore county police were there the baltimore county police show up and they asked me could i talk to them i said sure i even signed a paper saying sure i'll talk to you i got in the car with them they didn't handcuff me or anything i just jumped in the car with them in the back seat they took me to the police station i totally spaced that i got pot in my shoe it's in my sock under my shoes and i'm physically stepping on this thing you know and i walk in the police station and the first damn person i see it was a known snitch in town i said oh christ you know they got me i got like a quarter ounce a half ounce of pot in my shoe there was a lot of people telling people i thought that's what this thing was all about i always felt like well here it is man this is what you want in it but when i turned to corner there was detective bill ramsey part of the capella ramsey team working on this homicide standing there with his pocket protector and all these pens grease ball hair you know with short sleeve shirt on white shirt with his hands and a parade brass behind it he had a rock on the table like a piece of concrete with like something red on it and then a pair of panties on the table and they were sitting right right there he said we want to talk to you about when you were living up in baltimore and he said you heard about the murder of the little girl i said everybody did then he showed me this picture of her and asked me did you see two people fishing did you see two little kids fishing you ever been around a pond there i said no never been he said we're just trying to clear this thing up you know so now i'm getting really irritated with these guys because they keep asking me the same questions different ways you left your wife why was that were you having emotional problems or something i said i said well yeah like we couldn't get along i said i have no idea anything about this i've read it in the paper and seen it on tv i said it's an awful freaking thing and i hope you get this song a bit that's when he asked me would you mind taking a polaroid picture you guys said before you do though can i see the soles of your shoes and i'm like oh crap he's going to make me take my shoe off and the pot's going to fall out and i really got agitated and nervous there and i lifted my heels up on both hands and he said okay is that the only pair of shoes i had i said sure i had no idea at that time why he wanted to look at my shoe and he just put my heels down and i was like i've got to be the luckiest son of a on the planet you know i've just brought this weed in here and nobody uh you know i'm gonna walk out of here i take my picture it was a polaroid shot and we did it inside you know they didn't wasn't forthcoming on why and they said come on we're going to take you back to henry street and drop you off and that was it until the next morning that following morning [Music] i felt like well you know this is just another bump in the road but i knew something was going on after i got back to rose carson's house they were really leaning on them because rose was as white as this styrofoam cup man everybody's weirded out cause you know when i pulled out to go to the police station cops ascended on roads in them it started dawning on me man you know that something was really up and i just couldn't put it together the detectives they went back and put the photograph in a photo array and showed it to two main witnesses the two little boys both said the hair was too red but he looks like the guy you know they hightailed it back 245 i remember looking at the clock going through the door they were beating it down and trying to get to me open up it's the baltimore county police department we have a warrant for the arrest of kirk bloodsworth i go to the door open the door up and lights are shining in my face step outside mr bloodsworth you're under arrest for first degree murder of dawn venice hamilton you son of a i mean this place was surrounded they had cops everywhere turn me around read me my rights handcuffed me and that was the last time i seen my small town of cambridge maryland for eight years 10 months in 19 days and i remember kapell saying to me you haven't been honest with us i'm a young guy i have no idea what the criminal justice side of life is like back in those days they never did custodial interrogations with cameras and whatnot even a tape recorder i don't even think it was a tape recorder when i got in there he took the cuffs off and he sat me down in the chair just like i am now and then he started getting into why are you talking about the rock when i get over to rose carson's house she was like freaking out you brought all this heat over here they found a joint in my chaff my candy dish over there i mean they were just physically lifting stuff up and looking and they leaned on her a little bit about it and i was just like okay well i'm gonna go stay somewhere else i was walking through town i had no idea what i was gonna do and my friend thelma wants to go get high and she said what did the police want to they taught me this little girl that was murdered and she wound up calling the police and telling her i told her about the rock and a pair of panties on the table but i was just relaying what the cops said to me why are you talking about the rock i said the rock you had on the table man well that could have been it from another case how did you know it was about it i said i just said that's what you had sitting on there you know and then they said how could you do something like that you better come clean now and this is all they kept doing you want to come clean you want to come clean you need to tell us something and then finally i said i want to see a lawyer what do you want to see a lawyer for i said because you all think i killed this little girl and i didn't do it i told them three times three or four times that i wanted a lawyer they wouldn't let me see a lawyer i said let me call my father they wouldn't let me do anything he wouldn't let me call a soul until i got back to towson they already had me set man i was on a sleigh to hell and from the time they put the cuffs on me and put me in that police car vets were in motion for my conviction i was arrested in august of 1984 and by march of 1985 i was heading to death row [Music] i guess the criminal justice system is the mercury that leached in my system the fact that i can talk about it is my catharsis if i didn't have this outlet i'm a good i man 22 years old i mean those are the years that are that you're trying to define yourself but i had to live a life which the government the state of maryland put me through they made my life what it is today you know sure people can't dismiss what i was doing with my life how do they know what i would have accomplished had i been given a chance and an opportunity to do something it is definitely in a bad way [Music] [Music] when i can honestly tell you that if given an opportunity i wouldn't do anything i wouldn't i wouldn't want to be a part of this stuff but i have sort of a negative prestige i guess because of it how you all doing tonight do you smell it yeah [Music] that's right there's 143 exonerated death row inmates in the united states it's time to close the case the only thing that needs to die is the death penalty i was accused of the most brutal murder in the state's history the killing of dawn hamilton a nine-year-old little girl from baltimore county when they talk about the worst of the worst crimes that is what they're talking about it was always based on a witness identification of a man that was claimed to be six foot five curly blonde hair bushy mustache tan skin and skinny i certainly wasn't as robust as i am today but my hair was as red as a fireplace i had sideburns all the way down to here they were like any words you know the baseball player i had them all the way out here in the front and i don't tan i burn i spent a total of eight years ten months and nineteen days and two years on death row for a private and commitment it's time to close the case thank you even if we could prove with a hundred percent accuracy that phone was guilty what would still make the death penalty wrong the innocent one was behind him we executed five people and number six was innocent [Music] and that's something everybody can be proud of sister haven't put it better than i can to kill somebody to say killing is wrong [Music] one side was saying that you know this was me this was me this was me it was him it's them it's them you know and i'm trying to say no no no no no you know you got this all wrong i wasn't prepared man i felt awful every day just made me sick i couldn't eat it was almost like i was in some sort of outer limits movie or something it was twilight zone i just can't articulate how damning it all felt to me i didn't have any optimism other than i knew the facts i mean i knew that i didn't do it it just sucked it just sucked i just didn't get any help from my you know my lawyer i did i didn't and i felt like every single person was against me every single one i remember right before we went to court he comes to me the day before in all these months now eight months worth of waiting to have my day in court he comes to me the day before and says you know kirk got to come clean man i said what the you talking about man i was like i really got pissed at him if i if i could have got to him i would have slapped the out i would have i mean he just made me so after all this time i kept telling you think i had something to do with this are you out of your damn mind we're getting ready go to trial and you ask me this today and then he kind of like changed his attitude a little bit and because i jumped his ass and i should have been doing that from the gentleman he was an idiot the trial started in this big grand jury it was in every paper on every channel every day the entire time [Music] i just these people you could hear him in the back whispering i wish i could kill them this trial lasted two weeks they parade one witness right after the other there was no blood no hair no fibers no nothing that connected me whatsoever other than the eyewitness testimony was completely circumstantial completely and they based a death sentence on that they create a profile of who they thought committed this crime they said this person would be from the ages of 18 to 25. well i was 22. they also said he would have a love of water because it happened around the pond area actually it happened next to an access road way away from that this person would be living with a domineering mother or a domineering girlfriend or wife how many people's mothers or girlfriends are domineering the problem with this profile was that it was done by a police detective from baltimore county who had 14 weeks in a 28-week course and guess what it wasn't done until after i was arrested my defense lawyer well you can imagine what he did he didn't do anything he gave a defense that lasted maybe a a fraction of the time of the prosecutors when the gavel came down on my life the sentence was death guilty guilty guilty and that resonates to you like a hammer man especially when you know the truth i thought my life was over it was for all intents and purposes at that point was over i went to one of the most notorious prisons in the united states in 1985 the maryland penitentiary at 954 4th street in baltimore city this place looks like a gothic castle 20-foot thick dark granite stones with silver spires reaching up to the sky it lag irons on and waist chain and handcuffs and block you just have to walk you know when you when you walk like that you have to walk in this little shuffle i was going through the causeway walking down this long quarter through all the yards and all the other convicts were out there and you could hear the cat calls coming we're gonna get you kirk we're gonna do to you what you did to that little girl over and over and over they stuck me in a cell i could if i had my back to the wall of the cell i could take three steps to the cell door i could touch either wall on either side by going like this and a stainless steel mattress a stainless steel toilet and sink in one corner slate floors slight ceiling metal walls i remember one of the first nights and it was very vivid to me to this day i was laying on this bunk i was telling you about and reading a magazine and the power popped off you could not see your hand in front of your face and the other convicts upstairs and up in the upper tears they started screaming and shaking the bars and beating the floors and beating the walls and flooding the tears by shoving toilet paper and socks and all this kind of debris down in the toilet and flushing it over and over and this cascade of this incredible waterfall just started sweeping in and these things were coming out of the ceiling and hitting me in the mouth and in the face and in the chest and i'm brushing them off now they're shaking the bar so hard the whole tear is shaking they're lighting fires they're lighting their bibles on fire their quran's on fire anything they could get smoked everywhere and they're screaming and these things are hitting me in the face and in the mouth and the power pop back on and i'm i'm not kidding folks there was a sea of cockroaches swimming across the ceiling i used to have to take wads of toilet paper and stick him in my ears said he wouldn't crawl in there but this was my life [Music] [Music] prison in itself was mundane it was like being on assembly line that never moved [Music] you sit in this room about half the size of most people's bathrooms and you have to try to make it yours that was your home at about 6am you know you would get calls from the guards you know for breakfast and they would say feed up feet up be blocked feet up you would hear this you know it's like a bunch of sliding metal in those doors there's damn doors every day and there's keys there's really big brass keys that you could hear clanking and they would go into this like you know ghost like procession down to the chow hall every single morning almost like they were herding us like sort of like cattle normally they would have like two hard-boiled eggs a piece of toast some farina some juice or milk and you get that in a like a little pint-sized um a container and you know maybe some white bran and that was breakfast and then you would go back and lock in yourself i noticed one morning when we were walking down to this place to get these two hard-boiled eggs and maybe a cup full of puritan that everybody was looking down and i remarked in myself because you know and nobody was looking up at the stars and the stars were still up in the sky and nobody was looking up and everybody was looking down and that's exactly what i found myself doing later on i was just kind of adapting to something that i didn't belong in i would get mad at myself like why am i i'm just i'm becoming one of these guys and uh but i was one of them i you know i didn't belong there i was innocent but i was just like they were i was in the same spot same place same situation same life i got weary and tired and you know disgusted with it all and you know you want to you want to do anything to get away from this place and forget it for a few minutes and but it always comes back no matter what you do last place i seen my mother live at right here right here she said i was gonna get out i remember that she said she wasn't gonna live to see it five months before i got out she died she died in january i got out in july june almost five months today she told my father to go put some money in my commissary account and they came all the way from the eastern shore to see me my father and i stood right over there took a picture the problem was is i didn't belong here at all at all you know my mother she she she said before you know she passed away that i was going to get out of prison she said she had a dream that i was going to get out and and and had it several times and she said you will get out one day i'm just not going to live to see it and you know she told me the same thing on the phone two days before she passed away when mom died it was in january of 1993 she died the same day president clinton was inaugurated as president of the united states i was ushered in to the um funeral home in about seven in the morning um leg shackles waist chain and block you kind of have to walk like this you know and i was flanked by two guards with nine millimeters and my priest went with me uh al rose and i walked in the funeral home and there she laid in a mahogany casket and um i i could barely stand up when i was walking up to her and uh i i you know kissed her goodbye i stayed here for five minutes kissed her goodbye went back to prison not mister so much [Music] my mother's death was you know i thought that i would not live you know [Music] it uh almost crushed me but i always say that uh [Music] you know my mother was a very strong woman you know she was about five foot three if that you know but she was really in a lot of ways ten foot tall she used to say a lot of really cool things in letters to me and to try to keep me motivated inspired through this whole thing and keep me focused on my freedom she used to say if you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything and wright is like don't sit there like a bump on a dill pickle that was one of my favorites she used to say stand up and i remember coming back from the funeral home that day and all i could hear was my mother's voice stand up stand up boy my mother's voice i could remember her calling me for supperism calling my name kirk and you could hear her for a country mile and her voice just got louder stand up and it got louder and stand up and it got louder and i was physically pulling against my chains on the van and coming out of my seat i had a smile on my face because my mother's premonition i guess if you want to call it that was coming you know i had this euphoric feeling that everything she said was going to come true i was a prison librarian for seven and a half years one day i was sitting in my cell and a guard said bloodsworth you got mail and there was four books there was one book about origami i mean i figured i didn't have time to do origami so i gave that to somebody else and there was a book about pastel drawings and i kept that there was another book it was a joy of sex i threw that into trashcan but the fourth book was a book written by a guy named joseph womball called the bloody the bloody would describe the first time dna was ever used in a criminal case two girls were killed in england it was dinar borough killings the police initiated this talk with a man by the name of alec jeffries who is a professor at the university of leicester he is the founding father of what we know today is the genetic fingerprinting and these murders they had semen in these crime scenes and he said well i have this new technology and if we dna test the male population of the town of north earl we probably will find a killer because i think he's right here they wound up dna testing the entire male population of the town of narbor and the surrounding areas the test results come back and they're all negative two days later somebody overheard this man bragging to a friend of his he took a dna test for somebody else that man's name was colin pitchfork the real northborough killer he became the first person ever convicted behind genetic fingerprinting in the world i had an epiphany if it could convict you why can't it free you i remember jumping up from my bunk and stopping like in midair you know it was just like i hit my head and everything it was like this crazy moment in my life and i was like wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute you know i just started to remember it's like i was having these flashbacks from the purports possible scenes staying on underpin swabbing many spermatozoacene on the swabs you know i wrote ann brooke's a letter and told her i want to do this new genetic testing it's called it's called dna genetic fingerprinting i want to do it i'm innocent let's prove this thing once and for all and then we can find out who the real killer is this was my whole you know my whole deal out there i figured i'd get two birds with one stone and she wrote me back a letter and she said we regret to inform you that the dna has been inadvertently destroyed and i was like these son of a i thought they did it on purpose you know but they didn't destroy it they just couldn't find it the worst thing in the world for anybody that's going through a situation like that is to lose hope and oh man so many times you feel like it slip away from you i would write to people and so i wrote this letter to a guy by the name of gary christopher that was from the federal public defender's office at the television and i said look you know i'm an innocent guy and i need some help man and he wrote me back out of all the letters that i sent out over the years he wrote me back and he said that he knew this guy and he was going to try to get him to come see me i'm at the penitentiary and bob moore came to see me and i had this du-rag on my head sunglasses you know i got this ripped up shirt i looked just like you know i'm getting ready to turn into the incredible hulk got this attitude two chips on either shoulder and i sat down with all these binders that i had on my case and i took my rag off my head my sunglasses off and i sat there and looked at bob moore i had just a few minutes to try to tell this guy to take my case you know actually he was gonna come to the prison and tell me he couldn't take my case you know but i talked him into it the relation that i felt man was awesome because to get the quality of attorney like bob warren was like hitting the lottery i had the resources of an entire law firm in my hands at that time and they did it all pro bono everybody told us that there was no dna to test you know nobody could find it it was like so we really thought about it and i had read that book and i said wait a minute man where are the slides at where are the swabbings at where are the her underclothes were it said right in the report possible seam and stain on underpant i said bob we got to find this dna stuff we got to get the evidence out of the courthouse he said kirk i've been there it's not there they don't know where it is they've done something with it and i said mom you gotta go back and check he said i've already been twice i said man you gotta go one more time if you don't i'm gonna call you 20 times a day instead of 10. he went back to the courthouse and he went to the evidence place where it was supposed to be and lo and behold he wasn't there but he happened to be passing by a second trial judge's court clerk in the hallway the clerk said ah what are you doing here he says i'm looking for the hamilton evidence in the kirk bloodsworth case he said well i know where that is it's in the judge's closet in a paper bag sitting in the floor in a cardboard box paper bag in a cardboard box in a judge's closet and that was my key to my freedom he paid for all the dna tests himself and never asked for the money back he got the test done by the best geneticists in the country dr edward blake and you have to understand something it a half of of cell is what saved my life it was half of one cell that he found and that he replicated and extracted the dna from that and that's what excluded me it was all because of bob moore i owe him my life now i was calling bob lauren 20 times a day because on our agreement with the state's attorney's office we had to let them have their own experts test the dna to make sure it agreed with ours april 27 1993 i got this post-it note stuck in my cell and it said urgent call your attorney urgent i go down to the day room because i'm a librarian and i can get out i come on live more in a millionth time collect he was screaming on the other end of the thing kirk you're innocent man you're innocent i knew that he says now look now i don't want you to tell anybody about this and tell me get it going so i told everybody i called j miller on channel 11 and i said you ain't going to believe this jane she said what what what what i said the dna results are back and it seems it's not mine like i've been telling every damn body i said i am an innocent man [Music] it's a story that really is nothing short of incredible a man who was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison now has a brand new life with the stroke of a judge's pen kirk bloodsworth was set free today after dna tests cleared him of the murder of a nine-year-old girl i was in cuffs and leg irons that you had to walk you know it's like this and he took me over here put me in this sucker for a minute i remember sitting sitting down [Music] it seemed like forever and then the warden came and finally got me walked me down got me past this gate this is where he took the cuffs off after he locked the door and i cleared this door he opened this gate i was standing on the side with the doors shut the door shut you know and cameras was coming through this one doorway how you feel how you feel how you feel fantastic is all i could get out of my mouth this is it actually brought me through that door i sat right down here [Music] this is where i'll left that right here table was full i had plenty of people my father i was just like you know feet just you know just my father you need to relax them yeah it's easier said than done and all i wanted to do was walk out that door [Music] and then finally the warden came and said sign his paper and i said all right i signed a big game right through that door out the door and i went and this is the part where i swear this is like house in wonderland when alice steps through the looking glass and i come out to his place [Music] [Music] how's it feel man how's it feel great fantastic seriously i've just got a lot of flood of emergencies right now it's hard to describe two months to the day that i got the original test results i was free it's a bird it was a good day man yellow balloons lined my street and ribbons as i pulled up in front of my old house and my aunts and uh all my cousins and everybody were coming over it was one of the craziest times i had ever experienced and i had a sack truck in my front yard that whole night they stayed right there and i would go to the window sometime wave to them and be like here i am i'm free and i remember that first night i i stayed home it was four o'clock in the morning and i just popped up out of bed i had to go to the bathroom and so i didn't have a my my old bedroom that's exactly where i went to it was the bedroom that i had in my house well i didn't have my bed you know i didn't have anything in there my mother had a lamp that was laying in the floor of course she was gone i had a dresser and stuff and but i got up in the middle of the night and i'm in prison and the next thing i'm taking a leak on the lamp and i finally call myself and my girlfriend she said what are you doing i was never mind i know where i'm at now i was just laughing so hard and we cleaned a mess up and i went out in the kitchen and i seen a toaster sitting there and i was staring at this damn thing for like five minutes you know and the coffee pot and all the stuff my mother had there it was still in place you know and i got two pieces of bread and i popped them in the toaster and i pushed that thing down and i was just waiting and i buttered this toast and i sat there and i picked up the phone at 4 30 or so in the morning and called bob morin on the phone i said guess what i'm doing he says i don't care it's four o'clock in the mornings what are you doing i said i'm making toast and it was [Music] you don't realize i mean most people we were free you know out here and most people don't realize what you know how important something like that is you know i hate with a plastic spoon for nine years and i'm sitting there with a fork i remember rolling a quarter around in my hands and i thought to myself man how small is that thing i thought they were bigger you know and um the house seemed very small because i slayed in this prison it was huge you know even my cell was small but the prison itself was so large and i walked in it seemed like almost my head was touching the ceiling everything was just so different for me but freedom was sweet freedom is so sweet if you ever want to know what freedom's like have somebody take it away from me for a while and i can tell you when you taste it again it'll be just like the first time you've ever drank from that cup man i gotta tell you it was it was the most amazing thing i like to tell you that everything was rosy at that point but it was not because the day i got out the prosecution said this they had a big press conference they went out in front of the the cameras and said if we had this evidence in 1984 the dna they're saying we would not prosecute mr bloodsworth but we're not prepared to say he's innocent they had threw the burden of proof right back at my feet again i was getting phone calls and i got these calls on my instrument scene to my house saying you know we're going to get you kirk we're going to do to you what you did to that little girl people didn't believe they thought dna was some sort of shaman science back then they saw it as a get out of jail free card i got so tired of it i i wound up talking to a friend of mine by the name of barry sheck he's the reason why all these innocent projects are in this country and peter neufeld and he says you know what they got this new database out called codis we ought to try to get the dna submitted into that because they had to type dna in dawn's case that exonerated me so i called the prosecutor's office and i said look there's this new database it's called codis combined dna index system they had just tested some 16 000 inmates in the state of maryland and did the swabbing in the cheek and put this in the database in the maryland version and we can submit it well mr bloodsworth we can't do that and i said well why we don't have the money i said well forget it i'll pay for it how much is it can't be that much he said well we can't do that because that would be unethical because you're still a suspect really what was i going to do every time i went to crew talk on a talk show or talk in front of congress about post-conviction dna testing they kept speaking up against me they were so interested in finding out who killed this precious little nine-year-old girl that brutal crime i described to you did they do it in 94 95 or 96 when the databases were filled did you do it in 97 98 99 2000 2001 2002 2003 it took him 10 years to submit the dna in dawn's case to the database i was sitting in my office and in my house and doing some bills in the phone rang and on the caller idea it said baltimore county government i thought the last time i talked to them people wouldn't turn out too well but i answered the phone and on the voice on the other end was that same shrill voice i heard in two different trials calling me a monster it was ambrose the prosecutor from baltimore county she said we have an update on the hamilton murder but i can't tell you over the telephone so but i'll meet you anywhere in the state so i met her at the burger king i like whoppers she came here with two detectives they were working on a cold case and she sat there and she said we have a cold hit on the real killer of dawn hamilton his name was kimberly jay ruffler he was let go of two weeks before dawn hamilton's murder for two attempted rapes two other little girls in baltimore don hamilton was murdered and the police report came out about him that he was wanted he never went back to check ironically when i went to prison when he was on the tear below me i was i got so pissed off when i found out who it was and i told ann bropson everybody's sitting there i said well i know that guy he was in the prison with me as it turned out they were looking for a six foot five god and he turns out to be five foot six and 160 pounds he was right under their noses the whole time and got convicted and sentenced to life his life sentence won't start until his 45 years is up for what he was in prison for and so he'll be 75 before that begins take that dude you brought us here thank you so very very much for all of all of your hard work on this important issue that that sometimes seems an issue that an issue that says so much about us and yet an issue that many states have not yet been able to face follow with the sort of truth and the sort of understanding that the people of maryland and the people of this general assembly brought to this issue today the maryland general assembly of the death penalty we have a more responsibility to do more of the things that work to save lives and we also have a moral responsibility to stop doing the things that are wasteful and that are inexpensive and do not work and do not save lives and that i would argue run contrary to the deeper principles that unite us as marylanders as americans and as human beings you know i i'm always going to be remembered for this and and bloodsworth is going to be synonymous with dna and exoneration so i mean what do you do with that i mean i tell you what you do with it you have to run with it or go away and i decided to stand up try to help others in a situation like mine make it better for everybody [Music] [Music] my breath [Music] [Music] and they told me [Music] i didn't know everything i had learned [Music] anything you see will be used against you [Music] tell the story the way they like [Music] i was convicted of murder [Music] is [Music] [Music] until i find oh there's [Music] the victim's family was there everyone thought that it was me i'd have asked for their forgiveness but it was not my rifle please i had to watch my sweet mother crying when the vote came down and they sent me to die but time is [Music] and time is [Music] so sing me a sweet melody because they say that i'll never be free [Music] but as long as [Music] [Music] oh [Music] because i'm [Music] i'm gonna stand i'm up awesome

Channel: Real Stories

Views: 131,938

Keywords: American legal system, DNA exoneration, court case, crime documentary, crime investigation, criminal injustice, death penalty, documentary film, documentary storytelling, exoneration story, freedom fight documentary, judicial injustice, judicial system, justice served right, living nightmare, prison reform, true crime, wrongful accusation, wrongful conviction, wrongful death penalty

Id: pVgCd9P4fFs

Length: 82min 43sec (4963 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 16 2022