Dallas County officials have formally declared Tommy Lee Walker innocent in the 1953 rape and murder of a woman, acknowledging that racial bias and misconduct led to his wrongful execution nearly 70 years ago.
The county commissioners court passed a symbolic resolution on Wednesday exonerating Walker, who was 19 when arrested and executed in the electric chair less than three years later. The decision followed a multiyear reinvestigation by the district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, the Innocence Project, and the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law.
Investigators concluded that Walker’s arrest, interrogation, prosecution, and conviction “were fundamentally compromised by false or unreliable evidence, coercive interrogation tactics, and racial bias.”
“The court’s declaration today provides some semblance of belated justice to Mr. Walker’s legacy, and to his son, our client Edward Smith,” said Chris Fabricant, an Innocence Project attorney representing Smith’s family. “Mr. Smith has carried the generational trauma of the irreparable injustice his father faced at the hands of the State.”
Smith, now 72 and Walker’s only living descendant, attended the hearing. He recalled growing up without a father and the pain of his absence.
“It was hard growing up without a father,” Smith said. “When I was in school, kids talked about their dads, and I had nothing to say. This won’t bring him back, but now the world knows what we always knew — that he was an innocent man. And that brings some peace.”
Smith also shared his mother’s account of Walker’s final words, “He told my mother, and she told me. He said, ‘You give me the chair that belongs to someone else. I am innocent.’ That is the last thing my mother told me.”
The victim’s son embraced Smith at the hearing and apologized for the family’s suffering from the wrongful conviction.
District Attorney John Creuzot, whose office led the review, said the case revealed a coerced confession, a racially biased probe, and misleading evidence presented to an all-white jury.
“In observance of the constitutional rights afforded to all citizens and in consideration of newly available scientific evidence, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office could not and would not have prosecuted Tommy Lee Walker for the rape and murder of Venice Lorraine Parker,” Creuzot said in a statement, Fox 4 KDFW reported.
The crime occurred in September 1953 amid public panic over a “Negro prowler” accused of assaulting women in segregated Dallas. Venice Parker, a 31-year-old white store clerk and mother, was raped and stabbed while waiting at a bus stop near Love Field. She died from her injuries.
Multiple witnesses said Parker was unable to speak due to a neck wound, but one white police officer claimed she identified her attacker as a Black man. That unverified statement fueled a manhunt where hundreds of Black men were detained based on race alone.
Walker, who had no criminal record, was arrested four months later on an unsubstantiated tip. He insisted he was innocent, supported by nine or ten witnesses who placed him with his pregnant girlfriend as she gave birth to their son the next day.
Interrogated by Homicide Bureau Chief Will Fritz, a former Ku Klux Klan member, and District Attorney Henry Wade, Walker signed two confessions after hours of threats and deception. He immediately recanted the second, which police altered to match crime details.
“It’s not difficult to fathom what happened; they grabbed the first ‘Negro’ they saw,” said Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, who pushed for the resolution, CBS News reported.
Modern research highlights how such tactics lead to false confessions, noted Lauren Gottesman, another Innocence Project attorney.
“We now know, through decades of research and wrongful convictions, that the tactics used against Mr. Walker — threats of the death penalty, isolation, and deception, as well as the blatant racism in this case, increase a person’s stress and mental exhaustion, placing them at significant risk of falsely confessing during police interrogation,” Gottesman said.
The only other evidence came from two white eyewitnesses who identified Walker months later, after seeing his photo in the media as the “confessed killer.” They claimed to have glimpsed him at night from moving cars, factors now known to undermine identification reliability.
At trial, Walker faced an all-white jury, prosecutorial misconduct, and withheld exculpatory evidence in violation of constitutional rules. Wade testified to his belief in Walker’s guilt, then resumed prosecuting and said in closing he’d “pull the switch” himself.
Represented by NAACP lawyer William J. Durham, Walker drew strong support from Dallas’ Black community. Nearly 1,000 gathered outside the courthouse after his quick conviction, and groups like the NAACP, churches, and YMCA raised funds to halt his execution.
“I feel that I have been tricked out of my life,” Walker told the judge. “There’s a lot of other people who have been convicted for crimes they committed and was turned loose. I haven’t did anything, and I’m not being turned loose.”
His funeral drew 5,000 attendees. Wade’s office later oversaw 20 proven wrongful convictions of Black men, and the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged its jury exclusion practices.
Northeastern Law Professor Margaret Burnham, director of the CRRJ and co-counsel for Smith, said the case underscores ongoing issues.
“At the end of the day, our criminal justice system must address its fatal errors, no matter how long ago they occurred,” Burnham said. “This is the thrust of all our work. Clearing Mr. Walker’s name acknowledges him as a legally cognizable being, entitled — even after death — to justice, brings a measure of peace to his loved ones, and salutes those who, 70 years ago, fought to obtain justice for him — and for themselves.”
Nationally, black people are 7½ times more likely than whites to be wrongfully convicted of murder, according to a 2022 Death Penalty Information Center report, and 80% more likely to be innocent than others convicted of murder.
The case marks the oldest reviewed by Dallas County’s Conviction Integrity Unit and may be the first such posthumous exoneration by a U.S. court.
“We think it’s appropriate; we may be the first court in the country to do this,” Price said, per CBS News. “Of course, the community wants this. You can’t move on until you heal that sore that you know is out there.”
