UTC professor David Ross, center, holds a portion of the case
documents he and two grad students, Dominick Atkinson, left,
and Joseph Jones, right, used to exonerate Anthony Williams.About a year ago, a lawyer in Missouri filed a last-ditch appeal for a man who’d been sentenced at age 14 to life in prison for a crime many believe he didn’t commit.
In that appeal was research by UTC psychology professor David Ross that attorney Jennifer Bukowsky believed showed that witnesses gave impossible accounts of seeing her client, Anthony Williams, shoot and kill 14-year-old Cortez Adams during a “post-dance brawl” on Dec. 31, 1993.
Shortly after filing those documents Bukowsky got in touch with Ross and asked if he would look over the case.
“It was the worst I’ve seen in 30 years,” Ross said in a phone interview Friday.
He asked University of Tennessee at Chattanooga graduate students Joseph Jones, 24, and Dominick Atkinson, 24, to help.