You can almost close your eyes and set your watch to it.
It’s another day, which means another innocent male who had no business ever being locked up was exonerated through DNA evidence. Which means another life, this one Raymond Towler’s, was destroyed completely and in totality because he had to rot behind bars for decades before procuring his freedom. Check back with me this time next month for another case or two.
If you haven’t noticed, there’s a pattern developing here. These men seem to have one intriguing and striking similarity. Take a wild guess as to what it is.
They are overwhelmingly black.
Innocent black men are being freed so often these days, it should come with its own theme music. Perhaps even the soundtrack to Back to the Future. That’s because the last time Raymond Towler of Cleveland tasted freedom, John Travolta was gyrating in a polyester white suit in Saturday Night Fever and Quincy Jones was wondering if Michael Jackson could make it as a solo artist. Yes, it’s been that long.
It was only slightly touching that Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Common Pleas Court Judge Eileen Gallagher choked back tears as she hopped down from the bench, walked over to Towler and shook his hand. She didn’t wrongly condemn Towler to life in prison, but she knows one of her predecessors did. The unjust system she proudly represents did.
And thanks to modern technology and the advent of the information superhighway, Towler is totally clueless as to how to operate and function in this society. Worse, there’s a stigma attached to Towler’s like an awful stench that won’t go away no matter hard hard he scrubs. People are always going to wonder if he really did rape an 11-year-old girl in a Cleveland park.
Like Morgan Freeman said in the classic prison film, Shawshank Redemption, Towler has been institutionalized after spending nearly 30 years in a state prison. Now that he’s free, how is he going to make it on the outside? How did the other innocent black men fare after they were released?
Towler probably has extremely limited social skills, doesn’t know how to date and doesn’t know how to function unless being told what to do. For three decades, Towler lived to the soundtrack of ever-slamming cages and the jiggling of prison guards’ keys. That horrible song doesn’t just go away overnight, if ever.
Towler is now 52. He was 24 and a brilliant musician, according to former colleagues, when the U.S. Department of IN-Justice swooped down and robbed him of the prime of his life. The judge was kind enough to inform Towler that he can sue.
Sue? Towler can’t sue to recoup what the American judicial system stole from him. What he lost is gone forever, never to return. After the euphoria of freedom recedes and the oppressive reality settles in on his chest, how will Towler function then? That’s when he will really need his relatives who all sobbed in his arms in that courtroom on the day Towler was set free. –terry shropshire
