Kwame Ajamu was only 17 years old when the state of Ohio decided he needed to die.

Mr. Ajamu, now 64, spent 28 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit before being released on parole. It wasn’t until 11 years afterward that he, his brother, and their friend were officially exonerated.

Now, Mr. Ajamu is one of several death row exonerees traveling the country to preach against use of the death penalty. As part of the Ohio Innocence Tour, he’ll be in Toledo on Oct. 12.

The three men were convicted of a 1975 murder almost solely based on the testimony of a 12-year-old boy who later recanted his entire testimony and revealed he hadn’t witnessed the killing at all. He had been coerced by police to tell a fabricated story and identify a trio of innocent men as killers.

“May 25th, 1975,” Mr. Ajamu recalled. “There was a money-order salesman by the name of Harold J. Franks. Caucasian man, 59 years old, little guy. He entered my neighborhood that day, what would be the last day of his life.”

Mr. Franks was robbed and murdered outside a store in Mr. Ajamu’s neighborhood. When she looked out a window to see what was going on, the store owner’s wife also was shot in the neck.

“One week later, the Cleveland police would raid my mother’s home,” Mr. Ajamu said. “I was in bed asleep, and I was awakened by a shaking on my foot. When I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by Cleveland’s finest – at least 12 officers with guns drawn and pointed at me.”

Mr. Ajamu wasn’t afraid for his own life, but for his mother’s – she had a weak heart — and he feared she would have a heart attack from the cops’ shouting. He began screaming back at them until he was arrested, even though at the time, they only had warrants for Mr. Ajamu’s brother, Wiley Bridgeman, then 20, and best friend, Ricky Jackson, then 18.

After his arrest, Mr. Ajamu spent almost two weeks in a juvenile detention center before being indicted for murder. The story was that he had thrown acid on Mr. Franks and beat him with a metal pipe before Mr. Jackson shot both Mr. Franks and the shop owner’s wife. Mr. Bridgeman was alleged to be the getaway driver.

The shop owner’s wife survived the incident, and testified in court that neither Mr. Ajamu, Mr. Bridgeman, nor Mr. Jackson was involved. She knew those boys – they worked for her in the store sometimes. It wasn’t them.

“They still went on to find us guilty and sentenced us to die,” Mr. Ajamu said.

So on death row he sat, imprisoned for nearly three decades. He pleaded with God. He bargained with the devil. And yet, he found no reprieve.

Police canvassed the neighborhood after Mr. Ajamu’s arrest, searching for witnesses or information. They found Eddie Vernon, age 12, who told the police he had seen the murder. However, partway through young Vernon’s interrogation, the police suspected he was lying, Mr. Ajamu said.

“When he told those cops that he really didn’t see nothing or he was just making it up, they flipped on him, started screaming at him,” Mr. Ajamu recalled. “They told him that if he didn’t continue saying that he saw this crime and these guys, that they would arrest his mother for perjury, and she’d go to jail for five years.”

So the boy lied.

Decades later, when the trio got a new trial, Mr. Vernon was bombarded by prosecutors until he finally admitted that police coerced him into testifying against the three men. Mr. Ajamu said the lead prosecutor burst into the room and told the judge he couldn’t continue prosecuting innocent people.

“And then the judge came down and hugged me,” Mr. Ajamu said.

Mr. Jackson and Mr. Bridgeman were released from prison and their charges were dismissed Nov. 21, 2014. Mr. Ajamu’s charges were dismissed that Dec. 9.

Mr. Ajamu only ever got two apologies for what was done to him – one from that judge, and one from a young reporter who discovered after reviewing trial transcripts that Mr. Vernon, as a child, had testified with a different story in each of the four total trials.

Police never found Mr. Franks’ real killer. But Mr. Ajamu said that even if that identification were made, he wouldn’t want the person or people for whom he took the fall sentenced to death either.

Now, Mr. Ajamu speaks out against the death penalty, advocating for total abolition of capital punishment.

Throughout its history, Ohio has executed 393 convicted murderers, including 56 since 1999. The state’s last execution was in 2018, though 130 inmates are still on Ohio’s death row as of June. Nine are from Lucas County.

“There are 11 death-row exonerees in Ohio, so that comes out to for every five executions that Ohio has held, we’ve had one person formally exonerated,” said Allison Cohen, interim executive director of Ohioans to Stop Executions. “This is a problem that is not going away anytime soon. There are 190 death-row exonerations nationwide, and that number just continues to grow.”

Mrs. Cohen said the goal of the Ohio Innocence Tour is to share the stories of death-row exonerees across Ohio and to get the attention of the legislature so they may consider abolition.

“We think that the risk is too great that Ohio could execute an innocent person,” she said. “We’ve gotten it wrong 11 times, and even one would be too many.”

The tour begins Tuesday and Toledo will be its last stop. At 6 p.m. on Oct. 12 at Phillips Temple CME Church, 565 Palmwood Ave., Mr. Ajamu and two other exonerees will tell their stories. One is Ray Krone, a military veteran sentenced to die in Arizona in 1992, and the other is Derrick Jamison, sentenced to death in Cincinnati in 1985.

“I think that it is the right time to just get rid of it,” Mrs. Cohen said. “Every other state that has repealed the death penalty recently, they tried to fix it. They did the studies, they did the task forces, they tried to implement measures to make it more fair.

“They tried to eliminate the risk of executing an innocent person,” Mrs. Cohen continued. “But that just isn’t possible because this is a system that’s run by human beings, and so we’re better off just taking it off the table entirely.”

First Published September 30, 2022, 8:19 p.m.