Joyce Watkins.Photo: NewsChannel5
For almost 35 years Joyce Watkins insisted she never harmed her 4-year-old great-niece — who died, according to jurors who found Watkins and her boyfriend guilty, as a victim of murder and aggravated rape.
This month a judge agreed with Watkins,exonerating her and Charlie Dunnof the crimes that caused both to be locked away in prison for 27 years.
“I’m just happy to be out of this mess, which has cost me half of my life for nothing,” Watkins, now 74, said after the charges were dismissed, according to a news release from the Tennessee Innocence Project. “But I’ll get over it. I thank God for me being able to do this.”
Dunn, who also never wavered in his innocence, died in prison.
Watkins had taken the unresponsive girl to a Nashville hospital on June 27, 1987, the morning after she and Dunn picked up the child at the home of another relative in Kentucky. The girl died the next day.
The two were convicted in 1988 and sentenced to life in prison for the murder, concurrent with a 60-year sentence for aggravated rape.
Dunn died behind bars in 2015. Later that year Watkins was granted parole and released. But she still bore the burden of being a convicted killer who was required to register with the state as a sex offender.
Charlie Dunn.Tennessee Innocence Project
Hoping to clear her name, about a year ago Watkins walked into the offices of the Tennessee Innocence Project, Jason Gichner, the project’s senior counsel, tells PEOPLE.
The case against Watkins “didn’t make any sense from the start,” he says. “Joyce and Charlie were in their 40’s, they had full-time jobs, they’d never been in any trouble before. Then you meet Joyce, and you’re like, there’s no way.”
“Their families never thought they did this,” he says. The girl’s mother, whose daughter had been living with a relative in Kentucky for two months before Watkins and Dunn picked her up, “always believed that Joyce was innocent.”
“The jury had their hands tied,” says Gichner. “They hear from a medical examiner who says that these injuries must have happened during this window of time when she was only with Joyce and Charlie. And that’s just dead wrong.”
“Justice can’t be just about securing convictions,” Eaton tells PEOPLE. “It has to be about getting it right. We owe that to the victims, and we owe that to the people facing the system.”
In their parallel reviews of Watkins' case, the unit and the Tennessee Innocence Project learned that during the two months before the girl died, she had been the subject of abuse allegations in the home where Watkins and Dunn had picked her up. But a child welfare worker who responded had accepted the relative’s explanation of alleged physical abuse as “playground injuries,” and closed the investigation, according to the unit’s review.
As both dug deeper, the unit and Tennessee Innocence Project documented flaws in the original prosecution — including alleged withholding and destruction of evidence favorable to Watkins and Dunn. They also showed that medical advances unraveled the coroner’s claims about when the child’s injuries had occurred.
Judge Angelita Blackshear Dalton, who overturned the convictions Jan. 6 after reviewing petitions from both the unit and the Tennessee Innocence Project, agreed. She noted inher rulingthat the medical examiner, Dr. Gretel Harlan, eventually acknowledged mistakes in her methodology.
“The inaccurate medical opinions, presented in the context of erroneous circumstantial evidence, led the jury and court to rely on inaccurate and misleading information,” the judge wrote. “In short, the evidence in this case supports the claim that Joyce Watkins and Charlie Dunn are innocent and were convicted of crimes they did not commit.”
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District Attorney General Glenn Funk said in a statement: “My office strives to do justice always. That means recognizing that wrongful convictions, while rare, have occurred and must be remedied. We cannot give Ms. Watkins or Mr. Dunn their lost years but we can restore their dignity. Their innocence demands it.”
Eaton says her unit has secured five exonerations of wrongly convicted persons in the past year, with a sixth request pending, and said such reviews are “essential.”
“A lot of tears were shed over this case,” she says. “It was a tragedy on all sides. To think about what Ms. Watkins and Mr. Dunn lost, once we were shown the new medical evidence and when we considered all the factors that led to their original conviction, their innocence was so crystal clear. The medical evidence here was irrefutable.”
Gichner says the case now remains unsolved. “Joyce and Charlie were not with the child,” he says, “so we don’t know what happened, tragically.”
source: people.com
