On July 9, 2014, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles voted to commute the death sentence of Tommy Lee Waldrip to life without parole — one day before he was scheduled to be executed. Waldrip had spent twenty years on death row for the 1994 murder of Keith Evans, a conviction that volunteer attorneys had spent nearly two decades systematically dismantling with evidence the original trial never surfaced.
The crime and the conviction belonged to 1994. What changed between then and the summer of 2014 was the arrival of pro bono attorneys from Drinker Biddle & Reath, a major national law firm that took Waldrip's case in 1997 and began building his initial state habeas petition. Working alongside attorneys from the Georgia Federal Public Defender's office, the team spent years pulling apart the record left behind from the original proceedings.
What they found was damaging on two fronts. First, investigators uncovered evidence that Waldrip had exaggerated his role in the actual shooting that killed Keith Evans — that the account he gave of his own involvement may have been shaped, at least in part, by a desire to shield his son from prosecution or from a harsher sentence. False or inflated confessions manufactured to protect a family member are not unheard of in capital cases; what is rare is that post-conviction counsel ever discovers the mechanism behind them. Here, the legal team did.