David Keaton, the first man exon­er­at­ed from death row in the mod­ern era of the death penal­ty (1973-present), died on July 3 at the age of 63. Keaton was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in Florida in 1971 for the mur­der of an off-duty police offi­cer. His con­vic­tion was based on a coerced con­fes­sion and erro­neous eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny. In 1973, the actu­al per­pe­tra­tor was dis­cov­ered because of new evi­dence, and Keaton was exon­er­at­ed. In 2003, Keaton became a found­ing mem­ber of Witness To Innocence, an orga­ni­za­tion of death row exonerees who share their sto­ries to edu­cate the pub­lic about the death penal­ty. Kathy Spillman, direc­tor of pro­grams and out­reach at Witness To Innocence, said of Keaton, ​“His life was very dif­fi­cult. He was sen­tenced to Death Row as a teenag­er. And like all exonorees, he strug­gled with issues relat­ed to being on Death Row and inte­grat­ing back into a soci­ety that does not pro­vide sup­port for these men and women. [Yet], he was sto­ic and very gen­tle. He was a poet and a singer and when­ev­er he got the chance, he par­tic­i­pat­ed in activ­i­ties against the death penal­ty so that nobody else had to go through what he did.” Since Keaton’s exon­er­a­tion in 1973, an addi­tion­al 153 peo­ple have been exon­er­at­ed from death row.

(G. Ensley, ​“Quincy Five’s Keaton, exon­er­at­ed from Death Row, dies,” Tallahassee Democrat, July 8, 2015.) See Innocence.

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