well, i don t know. do you think that makes a difference now that we know he is mentally retarded? no, not at all. in this case, this is just a constellation of problems. even though the judges seem to be raising some serious questions, i came out of the argument feeling negative about our prospects. i didn t think the court had much incentive to overturn his conviction. we didn t hear anything for month after month. 14 months went by. and then i get an e-mail in my inbox. heart stops. i start hyperventilating. i clicked on it, and the opinion is 190-something pages long. and where is the good part? the most conservative appellate court in the nation had ruled 2-1 that elmore deserved a new trial. everyone in the death penalty community, what happened? we don t win like that, and not
had not been developed. when dna was available it came back positive that it was the victim s blood. prosecutors said that elmore s pubic hairs were found on dorothy s bed and finally prosecutors presented james gilliam, a prison inmate who claimed to have heard elmore confess to the crime while in jail. that came out of nowhere. that just rocked me. mr. elmore told gilliam that i went down there to rob the lady and she started screaming and i killed her. that was a lynch pin. the jury took less than five hours to reach a verdict. elmore was convicted and sentenced to death. but the conviction was overturned on appeal. there was one juror reluctant to impose the death penalty and the trial judge put pressure on the holdout juror to impose the
locked up all them years something i didn t do, and comes along, she believed in me. were you afraid of dying? not in a way, but like i say, i knew the truth would eventually come out, right. that s kept me going. it kept my faith right, and just taking it one day at a time. that s all you can do, you know, and hope and pray that everything come out all right. mr. elmore had been incarcerated for 11,000 days. the judge told mr. elmore that he had exhausted his sentence and he was free to go. you are free to go, mr. elmore. we could walk him out that door of the courtroom and down those steps as a free man. and that was i m sorry.
is bothering me. gilliam said he made a deal with the prosecutor to testify against elmore in exchange for release from prison. but with elmore facing the electric chair, he felt bad what he had done. i said james, make it right. and i got excited. i felt like once this comes out that ed would be free. gilliam said the testimony that i gave in these prior trials was false. that he made up this story to try to get better treatment for himself on his criminal sentence. gilliam would go on to state that the only thing elmore had ever said was that he didn t kill dorothy edwards. but diana s team also felt they needed to refute dorothy edwards time of death which the medical examiner had placed on saturday night during the only hours elmore had no alibi. diana hired forensic expert jonathan arden. in my opinion the victim died in the early afternoon on sunday. that time frame makes sense with the rigor mortis, the lack of
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