Randall Dale Adams

Randall Dale Adams (December 17, 1948 – October 30, 2010) was an American man wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death after the 1976 shooting of Dallas police officer Robert W. Wood. His conviction was overturned in 1989.

Throughout his legal ordeal, Adams maintained his innocence. He insisted that the man he believed to be Wood's killer, David Ray Harris, had offered him a ride on the day of the shooting after his own car had run out of gasoline. Under an immunity agreement, Harris testified for the prosecution that Adams was the shooter of Officer Wood. Based on this testimony and other alleged eyewitnesses, Adams was found guilty and imprisoned on death row. In 1980, his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

While incarcerated for the crime, Adams was the subject of the 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line, which was cited as being instrumental in his exoneration the following year. Writer-director Errol Morris knew that Harris had, on multiple occasions, bragged about shooting a police officer. He later uncovered evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and eyewitness misidentification. Six months after the film's release, Adams's conviction was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and prosecutors declined to retry the case. Adams received no compensation from the state of Texas for the twelve years he spent in prison. He died of a brain tumor in 2010.

Adams was born in Grove City, Ohio, the youngest of five children of Ola Mildred Hamilton Adams (known as Mildred, 1923–2011) and Canso Adams (1905–1960), a miner who died of coalworker's pneumoconiosis. Adams graduated from high school in 1967, and spent three years as a U.S. Army paratrooper.

In October 1976, 27-year-old Randall Adams and his brother left Ohio for California. En route, they arrived in Dallas on Thanksgiving night. The next morning, Adams was offered a contracting job. On the following Saturday, November 27, Adams went to start work but no one turned up because it was a weekend. On the way home, his car ran out of fuel.

David Ray Harris, who had just turned sixteen, passed Adams in a car that he had stolen from his neighbor in Vidor, Texas, before driving to Dallas with his father's pistol and a shotgun. Harris offered Adams a ride. The two spent the day together, during which they drank alcohol and smoked marijuana. That evening they went to a movie, where they saw The Student Body (1976, directed by Gus Trikonis) and The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974, directed by Jack Hill).

That evening, Robert W. Wood, a Dallas police officer, was working the graveyard shift with his partner, Teresa Turko, one of the first female police officers in Dallas to be assigned to patrol duty. Shortly after midnight on November 28, Wood stopped Harris' stolen car in the 3400 block of North Hampton Road because the car's headlights were not on. As Wood approached, he was shot twice in the forearm and chest by someone in the car. The vehicle sped off almost immediately after the shooting, giving Wood's partner little time to react; she later testified that she managed to fire upon the fleeing vehicle but to no avail.

The Dallas Police Department investigation led back to Harris, who, after returning to Vidor, had boasted to friends that he was responsible for the crime. Harris was arrested, but when he was interviewed by police, he accused Adams of the murder. Harris led police to the car driven from the scene of the crime, as well as to a .22 Short caliber revolver he identified as the murder weapon.