Oh, What? Death Row Inmate Exonerated After 30 Years In Jail? But That Has Never Happened Before!

Daniel Gwynn was wrongly convicted of arson in 1994.

Mar 01, 2024

Earlier this week, the state of Texas executed a man, Ivan Cantu, who was almost definitely innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. It’s deeply disturbing, but it’s also just the kind of thing that happens when you have the death penalty, which is just one reason why most civilized nations and states have abolished it.

But, on occasion, an innocent person actually gets exonerated before a state actually goes through with the execution — and that is also a thing that happened this week, in Pennsylvania.

After spending 30 years of his life on death row, 54-year-old Daniel Gwynn is a free man since the Philly DA’s office determined that there were multiple flaws in the original investigation — including an alternate suspect that no one bothered to find or make Gwynn’s attorneys aware of.

Via the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office:

On November 20, 1994, an unhoused woman named Marsha Smith was killed in an arson fire on the 4500 block of Chestnut Street in West Philadelphia. After a jury trial in which the Commonwealth relied on testimony from two witnesses and Gwynn’s confession to police – which he has recanted and the Commonwealth now finds unreliable – Gwynn was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
An alternate suspect in the 1994 murder had been identified by witnesses to police, but information about that suspect was never turned over to Gwynn, in violation of his constitutional rights. With no eyewitnesses, the police relied on information from two people who like Smith were squatting in that residence, and who police said identified Gwynn as “Rick” from photo arrays used in a separate murder investigation. Those photo arrays were never turned over to Gwynn’s defense counsel.
For decades, the DA’s Office maintained that the other murder was unrelated to Smith’s murder, and that the photo arrays did not exist.

Well, they did exist, but Gwynn’s photo was not in them. The “Rick” identified in the photo arrays was later found guilty of the previous murder, which the other two witnesses in this case also testified in … three days before the fire that killed Smith.

Let us note here that there is also lot of junk science related to fires in general and that no one is going to “fire investigator school.” Rather, those who determine whether something is arson or an accident are firefighters who inherited the gig from the last one to hold it. It’s all fairly arbitrary and personally I would not trust that anything was arson unless there was actual video of someone screaming “HELLO WORLD! MY NAME IS LUCY MCGILLICUDDY OF 333 MOCKINGBIRD LANE, PUEBLO, COLORADO 81009, AND I AM STANDING HERE DOING ARSON!” while clearly armed with a blowtorch. Or maybe not even that, given the advances in AI.

“The wrongful conviction of Daniel Gwynn, and his unjust imprisonment for nearly three decades, is a cautionary tale of tunnel vision in policing and prosecution,” said ADA David Napiorski, who led the investigation of Gwynn’s federal habeas relief claims, in an official statement. “The oath sworn by prosecutors to seek justice compels us to follow the facts, even when they contradict assumptions and biases. Not only were Mr. Gwynn’s rights violated at trial, but his conviction and sentence to death row likely allowed the person actually responsible to escape accountability. We also apologize to the survivors of Marsha Smith for the retraumatization they have likely experienced. They were deprived of justice in 1994 and are deserving of justice now.”

Gwynn’s exoneration will be the 42nd exoneration that Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office has overseen. Krasner was one of the first people in the country to run as a progressive prosecutor and has made it a point to get innocent people the hell out of prison. Especially when their cases are as flat out ridiculous as Gwynn’s.

“I am proud of the justice-seeking work done by our Law Division Federal Litigation Unit, led by ADA Katherine Ernst and ADA David Napiorski. The exoneration of Daniel Gwynn today frees a man who is likely innocent. Sadly, it also exemplifies an era of inexact and, at times corrupt, policing and prosecution that has broken trust with our communities to this day,” DA Krasner said. “The public expects the right consequences for those who commit violent crimes, and wants the innocent to be free. When law enforcement wrongly arrests, prosecutes, and imprisons the innocent, the guilty go free and are emboldened to do more harm.”

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Once again, for the ten billionth time … we are very clearly not good at this. I’m not talking about state-sponsored killing because clearly we are excellent at that in all its forms. No one is better! Rather, we’re not great at determining guilt, which seems like the kind of thing we should really work out before we go ahead and kill people.

Now, I admit I have a prejudice in that I believe the death penalty is immoral to begin with and I would really rather we not kill anyone at all, but I have a hard time grasping how anyone can look at what happened to Daniel Gwynn or any of the myriad death row prisoners who have been exonerated after spending decades of their one and only life behind bars and say “Yes, absolutely, let’s continue doing this, it’s working out great.” Unless they really don’t care if people are guilty or innocent, which seems, unfortunately, quite plausible.

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