He stood 6 feet 5 and weighed 230 pounds.
A 5-foot-8-inch, 180-pound man killed and raped the 9-year-old girl.
It didn?t matter.
Kirk Noble Bloodsworth was sentenced to death by a Baltimore County judge because five people thought they saw him do something he didn?t.
So the 22-year-old former Marine who had never been arrested went to serve the rest of his life at the Maryland House of Correction Annex in Jessup, a prison so brutal that a week earlier inmates there disemboweled a guard.
“I lost everything,” Bloodsworth said. “I didn?t have necessarily a whole lot, but I had my freedom. And the price of freedom is priceless.”
Eight years, 11 months and 19 days later, in December 1993, Bloodsworth walked out of prison a free man when authorities caught the real perpetrator. Bloodsworth, a Cambridge native, became the first man in the U.S. to be convicted of a capital crime and exonerated by DNA evidence.
Today, the former commercial fisherman will visit McDaniel College to tell his story and suggest improvements to the country?s criminal justice system.
Criminal lineups, for instance, should not be performed with everyone at one time.
Rather, Bloodsworth says, each participant in the lineup should be shown individually so witnesses don?t feel forced to choose someone.
Interrogations should be taped from beginning to end so judges, juries and attorneys can see first-hand how investigators got a confession, Bloodsworth says.
And state payments to people wrongfully jailed should be increased, he said.
The state paid Bloodsworth $300,000 for nearly 10 years ofhis life. That comes to less than $10 a day, and more than half of that money was immediately paid to lawyers.
Bloodsworth, 47, is now a driving force behind the Justice Project, a nonpartisan group that aims to make the justice system as fair as possible.
The Justice Project says 2.6 million prisoners are serving in the U.S., and 128 death row inmates have been wrongly convicted.
In 2004, Congress passed the Innocence Protection Act, creating the “Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Program” to help defray costs of post-conviction DNA testing.
“When you?re sentencing someone to die ? and I said the same thing to the judge ? there?s no way you can pull this thing back,” Bloodsworth said. “So to that end, this is me, this is what I tried to accomplish in my life.”
