A Black man executed for rape and murder in 1956 was recently exonerated after a years-long investigation assisted by Northeastern School of Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, or CRRJ.
The Dallas County Commissioners Court Jan. 21 posthumously declared the innocence of Tommy Lee Walker, a Black man wrongfully executed at 19-years-old for the 1953 rape and murder of a white woman. The verdict came after a years-long investigation assisted by Northeastern School of Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, or CRRJ.
The Innocence Project, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit and the CRRJ collaborated on the investigation, researching archival evidence for retrial. CRRJ’s team consists of law school staff and students.
“Mr. Walker’s arrest, interrogation, prosecution, and conviction were fundamentally compromised by false or unreliable evidence, coercive interrogation tactics, and racial bias,” a Jan. 21 public statement on the case by the Innocence Project reads.
Veronica Parker was raped and murdered in Dallas in September 1954, a period marked by racism in Dallas’ criminal justice system. Legal segregation was also enforced across all aspects of society including in public facilities, schools and transportation.
“The racialized treatment of Black people in Dallas at this time factored into [Walker’s arrest] as well because the media is insinuating that this is a Black perpetrator, that there are other Black perpetrators who’ve been involved in several other [murders],” said Alex Stein, the CRRJ’s program director.
Despite the lack of leads or eyewitnesses at the crime scene, the Dallas Police Department rounded up Black men in the area to find the perpetrator.
“There were no eyewitnesses to the crime at all. No forensic evidence available [that is] related to the crime at all. But after Tommy Lee Walker [was] arrested, there [were] two eyewitnesses, who are both white, who both testified that they saw him there basically on the street, right where the crime happened,” Stein said.
Four months later, police followed a tip that accused Walker of the murder, according to the statement from the Innocence Project. Later, the tipper sued the police department for never giving him the promised reward money for the information exchange.
Many documents submitted to the court as evidence against Walker were highly unreliable and racially biased, Stein said. Nevertheless, after hours of coercive interrogation by the Dallas police, Walker confessed to the murder.
At the time of the murder, Walker was at his girlfriend’s bedside as she went into labor with their first-born child, Edward Smith. Despite this alibi, and the 10 witnesses to it, the court convicted Walker of murder.
In 2013, Mary Mapes, a journalist, began investigating the case, giving Walker’s family and Smith an avenue to seek justice for Walker.
In 2022, CRRJ and the Innocence Project submitted the case on behalf of Smith to Dallas County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity. In 2026, Smith was represented by a team of representatives from the Innocent Project and CRRJ: Margaret Burnham, the project’s founder and Stein.
While looking through archival documents donated by the former Dallas Mayor Ben Cabell, a CRRJ attorney discovered that Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz, whose interrogation of Walker resulted in a false confession, was a Klu Klux Klan member.
“One of the things that ended up becoming a big part of the case that I think was really critical that we found were those Ku Klux Klan records,” Stein said.
This evidence was especially important to the case as it reflects upon the racially biased conviction and investigation.
Walker’s wrongful conviction was the result of evidence and eye witness statement manipulation and the failure to further investigate these statements’ credibility, according to the Innocence Project.
“A lot of times, there are patterns that carry forward into the present,” Stein said. “It’s been undeniably proven that innocent people have been executed. People who, if they hadn’t been executed, would have had legal recourse to be exonerated. Tommy Lee Walker himself would be pretty old, but it’s not impossible that he himself might not have been alive still.”
Psychological pressure is still used in interrogations today, and plea bargains dominate the system. These factors allow systematic biases and discrimination to influence verdicts, said Sindhu Iyengar, a second-year student at the law school who helped CRRJ’s team with briefing important documents.
“I also think that [this case] is really relevant today when we’re looking at the death penalty, or other types of laws and regulations and reparations,” Iyengar said. “These things that we consider to try and make things right for the Black community… the impact actions have had that were made 100 years ago have today, and understand that every decision that we make now is going to have a similar impact a century from now.”
The staff attorneys and students at Northeastern’s School of Law were integral to the effort to recover evidence proving Walker’s innocence. Iyengar said this contribution to the case and the final verdict has given her, and other law students, hope for the future.
“It’s definitely uplifting,” Iyengar said. “I think it’s really easy to feel like nothing we do has any real impact when we’re struggling against a [presidential] administration that doesn’t care, conservative states or parts of the country that don’t want to see changes come that make things better. To see a success like this made me so happy and hopeful for the world that we can still move in this direction and that good things are still possible, especially at the end of such a long road.”
