After spend­ing a quar­ter cen­tu­ry in prison, includ­ing time on Ohio’s death row, Timothy Howard and Gary Lemar James have been freed from prison and all charges against the men will be dropped. The men, who have main­tained their inno­cence since their arrest in 1976, were freed, accord­ing to Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien, ​“in the inter­est of jus­tice.” O’Brien stat­ed, ​“The les­son to be learned is what I said in the let­ter I sent a year and a half ago. We don’t want any­body in prison serv­ing time for some­thing they did­n’t do.” The sev­en-year effort to exon­er­ate Howard and James was led by their attor­neys in con­junc­tion with Centurion Ministries, a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion that has assist­ed in free­ing more than 30 wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed pris­on­ers since 1983. Attorneys for Howard and James pre­sent­ed pros­e­cu­tors with new evi­dence in the cas­es, includ­ing fin­ger­prints, wit­ness state­ments, and poly­graph results that were not avail­able dur­ing the orig­i­nal tri­al that result­ed in the pair being sen­tenced to death. O’Brien acknowl­edged that dis­miss­ing the charges means that the city of Columbus has a 26-year-old unsolved bank rob­bery and mur­der. (Columbus Dispatch, July 16th & 18th, 2003). See Innocence.

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