A Black teen has been exonerated by Dallas County officials more than seven decades after he was wrongfully convicted and executed for murdering a white woman, per PEOPLE.

Tommy Lee Walker was just 19 years old when he was arrested in 1953 and charged with the murder of Venice Parker, a white store clerk who was sexually assaulted and fatally stabbed while waiting for a bus in Dallas.

Despite the charge, Walker had a strong alibi as he was at a hospital for the birth of his first and only child at the time of the crime. Ten eyewitnesses confirmed his presence there and testified at trial.

Still, police arrested Walker four months later. According to the Innocence Project, the investigation relied heavily on racial bias and coercive tactics. After hours of interrogation that included threats of execution in the electric chair and claims of nonexistent evidence, Walker signed two statements confessing to the crime. One contained numerous factual errors, and the second was recanted almost immediately. Walker never confessed to raping Parker.

The case was prosecuted by then–Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, who later became infamous for his role in the Jack Ruby trial. The Innocence Project says Wade refused to turn over exculpatory evidence, presented unproven claims as fact, and even testified himself to assert Walker’s guilt.

Walker was convicted and sentenced to death. Despite assurances from police that a confession would spare his life, Walker was executed in the electric chair in 1956.

A recent review by the Dallas County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, working with the Innocence Project and Northeastern University School of Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, concluded that Walker’s conviction was the result of systemic racism, prosecutorial misconduct, and coerced confessions.

On Wednesday (January 21), the Dallas County Commissioners Court adopted a resolution declaring that Walker was wrongfully convicted and executed.

“We now know, through decades of research and wrongful convictions, that the tactics used against Mr. Walker — threats of the death penalty, isolation, and deception, as well as the blatant racism in this case — place individuals at significant risk of falsely confessing,” Lauren Gottesman, one of the attorneys representing Walker’s son, Edward Smith, said in a statement.

“It was hard growing up without a father,” Smith said. “This won’t bring him back, but now the world knows what we always knew — that he was an innocent man. And that brings some peace.”

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