Right before the Thanksgiving holiday, Walter Forbes was freed from prison after spending 37 years incarcerated for charges that were based on an admitted lie, according to USA Today.
Forbes had his entire life ahead of him in 1982 before one kind act nearly ruined his entire life. He had been attending Michigan's Jackson Community College full-time and had dreams to start his own real estate business once he graduated.
But while out drinking one night in 1982, he saw a bar fight start and stepped in to stop it. The very next day, one of the men involved in the fight, Dennis Hall, was found and he shot Forbes.
It took months for Forbes to heal from the injury but somehow, while recovering, he became implicated in Hall's death.
Hall was killed when his apartment building in Jackson was set on fire by his landlord, David Jones, who took out an insurance policy on the building just months before setting the fire himself. He committed a similar scam elsewhere in Michigan in 1990 but was never arrested for the crime. Jones made $50,000 from the fire he set at Hall's apartment but was never convicted. He eventually died at some point in the early 2000s.
On July 12, 1982, police found that Hall died in an intentionally-set fire and believed Forbes must have been the culprit considering Hall shot him.
Annice Kennebrew, a woman who lived in the area, lied and told police that she saw Forbes, as well as two other men, burn down Hall's apartment building.
Police were aware that there were holes in Kennebrew's story and the other two men implicated in the case were let go. But police were fixated on Forbes and went forward with his case despite their concerns about her. In 2017, Kennebrew admitted in court that she lied.
Court documents shared with USA Today show that in February, Kennebrew told a court she was intimidated by men from the neighborhood who threatened to cause harm to her family unless she falsely implicated Forbes.
“Merely being arrested and charged suggests to the jury that something happened even though they should be scrutinizing the evidence and presuming innocence. No jury wants to believe that a prosecutor went through the trouble of bringing someone to trial if they’re truly innocent,” said Imran Syed, Forbes' lawyer and a member of the Michigan Innocence Clinic.
In May 1983, Forbes was convicted of arson and murder. He was given a life sentence in prison.
Both Syed and Forbes lauded Kennebrew for admitting she lied and disagreed with the notion that she should be charged for lying, noting they want more witnesses who lie to come forward to help free the unfairly convicted. The statute of limitations has also passed, so any perjury charge against Kennebrew would not stick, Syed said.
“Even though it took forever, I’m still grateful she did the right thing, that she did finally tell the truth. It felt like all the possibilities that I was working on all those years were coming to fruition. I didn’t think it would take that long, but patience paid off,” Forbes said. “I don’t hold contempt for the people who lied to convict me. The reason is selfish: I wasn’t going to allow them to destroy me. If I didn’t forgive, it wouldn’t be detrimental to them, it would be detrimental to me.”
The now 63-year-old was freed on Nov. 20 from Kinross Correctional Facility and is eager to visit his elderly mother but had to quarantine due to COVID-19 restrictions.
While Forbes is at peace with the injustice he faced, he told USA Today in an interview that he has lost all belief in the justice system.
“Calling it the justice system gives a false impression. Just using the term ‘justice’ gives you the sense that it is a just system. Up until I was convicted, I thought the system would work, that it would correct itself. In hindsight, I was naive," Forbes said.
“I always knew what the end result was going to be, but I had no clue what I had to go through or who was going to be of help along the way. Surest thing I knew was I had to keep moving forward,” he added.
Now that he is out of prison, Forbes is staying with family in Detroit as he gets back on his feet and adjusts to a world that is very different than the one he left in 1983. Once he finishes quarantining, he plans to head to Mississippi to see his 94-year-old mother.
For obvious reasons, he is struggling to understand smartphones and is trying to reconnect with his family, who told USA Today that Forbes was part of what kept them all together for many years.
“I might spend half an hour figuring out what takes someone else 20 seconds. I’ll be missing calls because the phone be acting up on me. I don’t know how to operate it yet," he joked.
There is a law in Michigan that says anyone who is unfairly jailed will receive $50,000 for each year the person spent in prison, meaning Forbes is slated to receive more than $2 million for his 37 years in prison. But it will take months, and potentially years, before he sees any of that money, according to his lawyer Syed.
Although he has been released, he is still concerned about the people he was locked in prison with. Michigan Department of Corrections has reported more than 1,000 COVID-19 cases at the Kinross Correctional Facility.
"The challenges of readjusting to life outside prison, I see it as part of the process. I recognize what I can control and can’t, and when I do see challenges, I don’t stress and I try to find a solution to them,” he said.
“A lot of things you don’t realize you miss because they just faded away. I am still trying to figure out the most effective way to help others. Seeing my family for the first time, it was one of those moments where all you can do is grin,” Forbes added.
Forbes' lawyers have created a GoFundMe page for him to get back on his feet. About 200 donors have already given more than $10,000.
