(ConservativeHub.com) – After spending decades in prison with a death sentence hanging over his head, Christopher Williams returned to society as a free man in February 2021. He was trying to rebuild the life stolen from him by wrongful convictions, but the 62-year-old apparently had just a short time left. On December 16, an unknown assailant fatally shot him in the head while he exited a car at a funeral at the Mount Peace Cemetery on Lehigh Avenue in Philadelphia.
Courts found Williams guilty of six homicides in 1992 and 1993. He received life sentences or the death penalty for these crimes and spent 25 years on death row until an investigation freed him.
Philadelphia man on death row for 25 years, cleared of 6 murders, shot and killed attending funeral: reports https://t.co/X9gy2etIma
— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 22, 2022
From 2019 to 2021, the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit worked to reverse his convictions on all six counts. The court eventually agreed there were no valid grounds for his conviction, and in February 2021, Williams left prison completely exonerated of any wrongdoing.
But someone cut his freedom short, and one of his co-defendants, Theophalis Wilson, whom the court also deemed innocent of the crimes, expressed an ongoing fear that became even scarier with Williams’s execution. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, explained not everyone believes in their innocence, and many like him and Williams go back into society to face situations where people are ready to retaliate.
At the time of his death, Williams was in the middle of a federal civil rights lawsuit in which he was asking for compensation for the years he lost behind bars. He was planning to start a construction company and was working to help others like himself to re-enter society after wrongful convictions.
Williams’s murder remains an active homicide investigation.
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