For a long time after he was exonerated and
released from Oklahoma's death row, Greg Wilhoit didn't know what to do with his
life.He drank a lot and holed himself up in a little house in Oklahoma, its own sort of jail cell. He panicked when a police cruiser drove by, certain that law enforcement stood ready to wrongly target him again. He sank into depression.
Then, on the invitation of a lifelong friend, he moved to Sacramento. While the fallout of five years behind bars in Cell 13 of the state penitentiary for a murder someone else committed is lasting, Wilhoit, 48, has found a calling.
He's changing the world "a little, bitty corner at a time." That might seem almost fanciful, so go ahead, check it out sometime if you don't believe it. Or even if you do.
Wilhoit makes the rounds these days, telling his story to law school classes, churches, civic organizations -- to almost anyone willing to listen.
In 1987, Wilhoit was sent to Oklahoma's death row to await execution by lethal injection for the 1985 rape and murder of his estranged wife, Kathryn. Wilhoit was convicted exclusively on the testimony of the prosecution's bite-mark experts, both of whom claimed the bite on Kathryn's body exactly matched Greg Wilhoit's. Hair and fingerprints at the scene were not his.
Wilhoit's once-prominent attorney -- who showed up in court drunk, even urinating on himself there on two occasions and vomiting in the judge's chambers -- never refuted or even questioned the bite-mark testimony.
Wilhoit's extended family, meanwhile, kept hoping the attorney would "pull a Matlock." Instead, Wilhoit got the death penalty. "I was devastated; in utter disbelief," Wilhoit said. "This was not happening to me."
Only on appeal did a state public defender named Mark Barrett refute the prosecution's only evidence, the bite marks. Wilhoit was on death row for about six months before Barrett, a quintessential public defender assigned to him, looked at the case and the evidence and came to believe he had an innocent man on his hands.
"This is what these guys live for," Wilhoit said.
Barrett wanted to send the bite-mark evidence to 12 of the country's top forensic odontologists, but he warned his client that if even one thought it was close to a match, Wilhoit was doomed.
Without a moment's hesitation, Wilhoit told Barrett to go for it. "Why shouldn't I?" Wilhoit said. "I knew those weren't my bite marks." All 12 said there was no way it was Wilhoit's bite; some found as many as 20 discrepancies. The prosecution's witnesses turned out not to be experts. The judge freed Wilhoit on the spot when it became clear the prosecution had no case. It was April Fools' Day 1993.
"I was weeping like a small child," said Wilhoit, who, by this time,
had lost five years on death row. His family and most of the jury also were in
tears.An "enthusiastic supporter" of the death penalty before he was wrongly convicted, Wilhoit has joined others calling for a moratorium on capital punishment until Americans can be certain that innocent people aren't being executed.
If that's possible. As Wilhoit sees it, there are too many variables. Too many mistakes. Too many egos simply wanting to win cases.
"That's what happened to me," he said. "To this day, no one has admitted they were wrong; that they made a mistake."
While DNA testing was not part of Wilhoit's successful appeal, he hopes the scientific tool eventually might nail his estranged wife's real killer.
This is important because his read on people is that in the eyes of many he'll never be 100 percent innocent until the real killer is caught and convicted. Try living with that.
Which is all to illustrate that an exoneration is rarely the end of the journey. Many former death-row inmates find few employers are willing to take a chance on them. Neither are people in general.
"Even if the judge says you're exonerated, there's always going to be some people thinking you got out on a technicality," Wilhoit said. Some people in his native Tulsa. "still think I did it," he said, mostly because no one else ever was arrested.
Wilhoit has pressed officials to release for testing DNA evidence from his wife's murder, but so far they refuse to do so. "They don't want to find out who did it because they've never said they were wrong and they don't want to," he said. "I don't know how some of these prosecutors can sleep at night."
Wilhoit, meanwhile, is turning into a sought-after speaker about his experiences -- mostly because of his folksy eloquence. What you learn is that his is the tale of many. Too many.
Like others among the falsely convicted, Wilhoit lost years of his life, the opportunity to raise his two daughters and his livelihood. His physical and mental health deteriorated in prison and he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Social Security and disability checks are his only reliable income. He never received an apology or one penny in compensation, although the Oklahoma Legislature has voted overwhelmingly three years running to pay him $200,000 -- legislation the governor refuses to sign.
Wilhoit refuses to be bitter or vengeful, which doesn't stop him from fighting to keep questions about the death penalty before people, or from treasuring each new sunrise.
"Every day that I wake up," he says, grinning, "and I'm not dead or on death row, it's a bonus day."
