Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 3 May 2001 — Page 19

The Muncie Times, May 3, 2001, page 19

Tennessee man almost executed for murder he may not havecommitted

There are more than 3,600 men and women on death row across the United States. One of them is a man named Philip Workman, who sits on death row at the Riverbend Correctional facility in Nashville, Tenn. Scheduled to be executed on March 30, after being refused clemency by Gov. Don Sundquist, Workman is still alive because of a stay of his order of execution by the Tennessee State Supreme Court—after all his other options failed. Workman’s story is not unlike that of many others sitting on death row. A cocaine addict, Workman committed armed robbery in Memphis, Tenn, in August 1981. The police arrived and Workman was bludgeoned on the head with a heavy-duty flashlight. In the ensuing fight, Workman tried to flee and shots rang out. One of the police officers lay fatally wounded. Like ^so many punishment cases, this one took many twist and turns. The police soon found an “eyewitness”, whose car was supposedly parked right on the corner of the robbery and who testified at the trial that he saw Workman take aim at the police officer and fire in cold blood. Workman’s lawyer did little investigation and urged his client to seem forgetful. Workman was found guilty and given the death penalty. In the many years since Workman’s trial.

appellate attorneys have made extraordinary headway in his case. They located the “eyewitness”, who had left the state, and who admitted that he was not at the crime scene, but several blocks away, taking drugs with a woman who testified that he was with her. When preparing clemency documents, they found a medical examiner’s report which referred to an X-ray of the police officer, and x-ray which had been “lost” for nearly a decade, despite a court order to produce it. That X-ray substantiated the lawyer’s claim that the fatal wound to the officer was inconsistent with the ammunition in Workman’s gun. Most likely, the police officer was killed by another officer’s bullet, not Workman’s. But despite the many questions raised by the investigation done by Workman’s legal counsel, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals split a 77 in the fall of 2000, effectively denying Workman and evidentiary hearing. Then Workman’s lawyers found that while the state attorney general’s office argued before the federal court that if Workman were innocent he could always appeal to the governor for clemency, representatives of the state were planning a post execution press conference to be held at the site of the cime— because they had seen “similar presentations JUSTICE SEE PAGE 21

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