Randall Dale Adams
Randall Dale Adams (December 17, 1948 – October 30, 2010[1]) was an American man wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death after the 1976 shooting of Dallas police officer Robert W.He insisted that the man he believed to be Wood's killer, David Ray Harris, had offered him a ride on the day of the shooting after his own car had run out of gasoline.While incarcerated for the crime, Adams was the subject of the 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line,[5] which was cited as being instrumental in his exoneration the following year.[7] Six months after the film's release, Adams's conviction was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and prosecutors declined to retry the case.[8] David Ray Harris, who had just turned sixteen, passed Adams in a car that he had stolen from his neighbor in Vidor, Texas, before driving to Dallas with his father's pistol and a shotgun.The Dallas Police Department investigation led back to Harris, who, after returning to Vidor, had boasted to friends that he was responsible for the crime.[9][10] Harris led police to the car driven from the scene of the crime, as well as to a .22 Short caliber revolver he identified as the murder weapon.In 1980, the Supreme Court on an 8–1 vote ruled unconstitutional a Texas requirement for jurors to swear an oath that the mandatory imposition of a death sentence would not interfere with their consideration of factual matters, such as guilt or innocence, during a trial.[15] Before the trial could begin, however, Texas Governor Bill Clements commuted Adams's sentence to life in prison at the request of the Dallas County District Attorney.[1][16] In May 1988, David Ray Harris, by that point himself a prisoner on death row, admitted that Adams was not even in the car on the night of the murder.[19][20] The appeals court found that Mulder withheld a statement by Miller to the police that cast doubt on her credibility and also allowed her to give perjured testimony.[28][29][30] After his release from prison, Adams ended up in a legal battle with Errol Morris, the director of The Thin Blue Line, concerning the rights to his story.