The Innocence Project of Texas

Letters of the Law

Written by Joyce King * Photo by Greg Kendall-Ball

Keith E. Turner was never a big fan of writing letters. So when the Dallas native decided to pick up a pen, he knew chosen words that met the paper might just be his last hope to prove he is an innocent man.

On a hot summer evening in 2001, Turner sat, with a remote for company, flipping channels. He landed on Court TV. The show featured a case similar to the one that netted him a 20-year prison term for a rape he didn’t commit in Dallas County. Turner sat up and took mental notes. “DNA cleared the guy and that’s where I got the idea from.”

Few people in the criminal justice system are interested in hearing the pleas of convicts claiming innocence. At one time or another, men who know they are guilty have railed against their rightful convictions to exclaim innocence. It tends to make it harder for innocent men to be taken seriously and have someone give a damn about the injustice that put them behind bars in the first place.

Perhaps the difference between the innocent and pretenders is parole. Once innocent men get out of prison, they always maintain their innocence and never give up that one day the truth will be revealed. They seek genuine freedom, not just release from prison. They are never content with the degradation and humiliation associated with being a card-carrying registered sex offender. So they beg for help. They tell their stories to anyone who will listen. They write letters.

After the television show, Turner, now 46, went out and bought a stack of paper and a bag of ink pens. He wrote until his hand throbbed.

“please believe me the lord know [sic] I am Not guilty but Sir back in 1983 I could not prove my blood test at the time but now they have D and A and I can prove that I am not the one Sir and I am asking you for Justice for me and my family.”
Those are Turner’s own words from a letter he wrote to then – Dallas County District Attorney Bill Hill.

***
It was December 1982. A 33-year old woman left the warmth of her East Dallas apartment because her son needed some clean clothes for school the next day. She headed for the laundry room, a place she didn’t consider the safest haven for doing chores. The young mother of three really didn’t like being there alone. Her husband hadn’t arrived home, so she ducked in and put a load of clothes in the wash.

A few minutes later, the woman returned to put clean clothes in the dryer. A stranger followed her into the laundry room, the woman instantly believed something was about to happen. It did. He turned off the light. He slapped her hard. She screamed. He issued a warning and proceeded to rape her. The man fled.

The victim told authorities she’d never seen her assailant before but that she would never forget the face underneath a baseball cap. Four months later, while at her job, the woman believed she saw the man walk right into the break room. He worked for the same furniture store as a driver. It was 22-year old Keith Turner. She alerted a supervisor. The woman was absolutely positive – by his face and voice – it was the man who had raped her. Turner was quickly arrested, his photo picked from an array.

At the September 1983 trial, there was no physical evidence used by the prosecution to link Turner to the crime. There were alibi witnesses who testified Turner was miles away watching Monday Night Football when the crime occurred. There was no lengthy deliberation by an all-white jury. “They didn’t believe me or the witnesses,” Turner said. The victim’s lone eyewitness account versus the word of an undereducated young black man who was so scared when authorities came to arrest him, he hid underneath his mother’s sofa, was too compelling for jurors to ignore.

Turner served six-years before being paroled back to Dallas County as a sex offender. His mother had died shortly after his prison stint began. Turner was a free man without the freedom necessary to earn a living, come and go as he pleased, and without the freedom to be the kind of father he had dreamed of being. Turner was listed on a county website with other criminals. “Officials, at one time, threatened to put a ‘Sex Offender Lives Here’ sign in my front yard,” he said. These and other cold realities ate at Turner’s soul. He was the living, breathing definition of rage.

“I was mad at the state of Texas. I was mad at the woman. I was just mad at the world.” Turner was so angry he did destructive things that made it seem he was madder at himself than anyone else.

Trying to find employment was hit or miss. Turner had always been willing to work. After prison, he was forced to check the “yes” box for convicted felon and explain the crime, the time, and hope an employer would trust he could do the work and that he wasn’t a rapist. He grew tired of the questions and the stares. He grew tired of explaining why he maintained an innocence vigil. Turner briefly found comfort in alcohol and drugs but any respite from the daily grind was always short-lived. Turner knew nothing manmade could erase or silence what the Great Creator’s mission for him was.

“I would argue with God sometimes, ‘Why did you do this to me?’” Turner remembered. Then Turner remembered the woman who raised him, gone but never forgotten. Doretha Dirks would never approve of self-pity, drug use, or an absence of faith. It took some doing, but the embittered son administered her tough parental love and a double dose of reality to kick bad habits to the curb.

Turner, a father of four, had to live with many regrets. A shaky marriage failed. Steady work continued to elude him. Through the rain, and pain, Turner never wavered from his true position that the whole world would learn Dallas County had convicted and incarcerated an innocent man. “I feel bad for the lady that got raped, but what about the guy who didn’t do it and went to prison? What about what he goes through?”

Alone in his humble abode, Turner was doing what he did most hot, dog-day afternoons in 2001. He was watching television and trying to keep cool. Call it destiny. Call it fate. Maybe it was just the luck of the remote. Turner stopped on Court TV, fixated by the topic of DNA and actual innocence. A short time later, he began to write the letters that would prove instrumental in his uphill fight for justice and exoneration.

Turner not only wrote D.A. Bill Hill, but he also penned sincere dispatches for mercy to anyone he could think of, including the courts, the state attorney general and the public defender in Dallas. He even wrote to his new favorite show, Court TV, for more information. Turner sent letters for weeks.

Turner knew his cursive writing wouldn’t win any prizes for punctuation and grammar. He also knew that if he put his heart into those letters, some compassionate human being would see past the errors and be moved by the simple truth. He was wrongly convicted and the “D and A” he was asking for would prove it.

Finally, an October 2001 letter to State District Judge Cliff Stricklin paved the way for Turner’s DNA testing request. The judge was in court and ordered Turner to wait until he finished proceedings. That took several hours. When Turner stood before Stricklin, the judge had one question, “You’re the one who’s been writing all these letters aren’t you?” Stricklin was so impressed with Turner’s sincerity – the same brand demonstrated in those letters – that he appointed a criminal defense lawyer to file the motion for testing.

In May 2004, Turner finally got his wish granted. “I had to wait 45 days, but I wasn’t worried because I knew I didn’t do it,” Turner said. The DNA testing yielded conclusive results that he was not the rapist. “It was like a big building had been moved.” Turner was innocent, just as he had maintained for 20 years. “When I got that DNA test back, I went out to my mom’s grave and told her she didn’t have to worry about me anymore because it was over.”

Turner’s mother always believed he was innocent. She spent several thousand dollars in those initial days. Six months after Turner had been wrongly convicted and incarcerated he was at his mother’s funeral and then hauled right back to prison. After DNA proved his innocence, Turner breathed freely for the first time. He worked on rebuilding relationships, and spent time visiting his three daughters and a son, now ages 16-21. Turner knew he had to exercise patience as the clock ticked toward one remaining confirmation, the final component exonerated men pray for in Texas.

When the holidays rolled around the next year, the best gift Turner could receive came two days before Christmas 2005 – the signature of Gov. Rick Perry on a full pardon for Keith Edward Turner. INNOCENT was stamped and approved with the state of Texas seal to authenticate and validate what Turner always knew.

“When I saw that pardon, it meant they realized they were wrong and I’d been right for 21 years. I was reborn.”

***

At a 2007 Innocence Project of Texas conference held at Wesleyan School of Law in Fort Worth, Turner was joined by other exonerated men from around the state. “If you’re accused of a crime, it’s terrible,” he told law students in attendance. “I’m thankful there’s DNA.”

For a man who rarely ventures from his rented space in Dallas, neighboring Fort Worth was around the corner and a world away. Turner admitted some of the scars will never fully heal but that he tries to enjoy the simple life as much as possible. That life includes writing letters and watching Court TV.

Except these days, Turner probably knows more about DNA than a lot of people he’s seen on the show.

*Joyce King is the author of the critically-acclaimed HATE CRIME: The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas and a forthcoming book on the Innocence Project of Texas.