Four Years After They Executed Him, DNA Shows He Didn't Do It

Fingerprints as police evidence
Via Wikimedia Commons
Zain Murdock
May 16, 2021

There was no physical evidence proving that Ledell Lee murdered a white woman in 1993. But that didn’t stop Arkansas from imprisoning him for 22 years and executing him by lethal injection in 2017! 

Now, though, evidence has arrived. What does it show?

It took the city of Jacksonville, Arkansas being SUED to allow new DNA and fingerprint testing on the murder weapons – and they found that neither of them matched Lee. So why did he end up being the one to go to prison?

Lee’s case shows the incompetence of the system at every level. 

He had a lawyer who came to every court hearing “drunk and unprepared,” eyewitnesses giving unreliable information, and an all-white jury that Lee’s sister claimed in a lawsuit could not have been “truly objective.”

That doesn’t matter to the criminal legal system, though. Its goal is to kill and disenfranchise Black people every single day. And, with Lee, that’s exactly what they did.

Ledell Lee and countless others cannot get their lives back after being executed for “crimes” they didn’t commit. But even for people who aren’t “innocent,” the state does NOT have the right to decide who gets to live or die! This system doesn’t serve us justice. In fact, it eliminates the opportunity for justice at its core.

We have a quick favor to ask:

PushBlack is a nonprofit dedicated to raising up Black voices. We are a small team but we have an outsized impact:

  • We reach tens of millions of people with our BLACK NEWS & HISTORY STORIES every year.
  • We fight for CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM to protect our community.
  • We run VOTING CAMPAIGNS that reach over 10 million African-Americans across the country.

And as a nonprofit, we rely on small donations from subscribers like you.

With as little as $5 a month, you can help PushBlack raise up Black voices. It only takes a minute, so will you please ?

Share This Article: