DALLAS, TX – Nearly seven decades after Texas strapped a 21-year-old Black man into the electric chair for a rape and murder he did not commit, Dallas County has formally exonerated Tommy Lee Walker in a ceremony that brought together the families of both the wrongfully executed man and his alleged victim.
Walker was put to death on May 12, 1956, convicted by an all-white jury despite multiple witnesses who confirmed he was with his pregnant girlfriend on the night of the killing. The crime occurred three miles from where Walker was that evening.
“I feel that I have been tricked out of my life,” Walker declared at his sentencing. Those words haunted his son Ted Smith, now 72, who was born the day after the crime his father was accused of committing.
The exoneration came after Smith brought the case to the Dallas County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit with help from the Innocence Project. What investigators found was a textbook example of how the justice system failed Black defendants in the Jim Crow South.
District Attorney John Creuzot’s office discovered that hundreds of Black men had been interrogated solely based on their race after the murder of Venice Parker, a 31-year-old white woman who was attacked on her way home from work in 1953.
Walker was interrogated for extended periods without a lawyer present. Authorities threatened him with the death penalty unless he confessed. He eventually signed a confession but recanted almost immediately, saying he had been coerced.
No other evidence supported the conviction. The prosecutor even took the witness stand himself and told the all-white jury that Walker was guilty.
In a moment of reconciliation at the exoneration hearing, Joseph Parker, 77, the victim’s son, embraced Smith and apologized for the loss of his father.
The county resolution acknowledged a “moral obligation to acknowledge the injustice” and affirmed that “justice has no statute of limitations.”
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