From death row to freedom: Why story of Kirk Bloodsworth's DNA exoneration still resonates

After he was sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit, the story of a Maryland man exonerated by DNA evidence has reached readers across the country.

Now, Eastern Shore author Tim Junkin's book, "Bloodsworth: The True Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by DNA," is being recognized by Maryland Humanities as the One Maryland One Book selection for 2018.

First published in 2004, the book chronicles Kirk Bloodsworth's arrest and conviction for the 1984 rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl and his eventual exoneration based on DNA evidence.

A committee that includes librarians, educators and authors selected the novel based on a list of 209 suggestions from readers statewide with this year's theme of justice. Other finalists were Bryan Stevenson’s "Just Mercy" and Jesmyn Ward’s "Sing, Unburied Sing."

Delmarva Now caught up with Junkin to discuss Bloodsworth's story and its continued impact in Maryland and beyond.

Can you tell how you first got interested in the story of Kirk Bloodsworth's exoneration and how this project first came to fruition?

I had written two books with Algonquin as my publisher, and they were novels. I was sort of looking around for a new project. I did some death penalty work when I was practicing in D.C. Actually, at the time, I was still practicing. I knew a lot about friends of mine who had gone down to Georgia and Alabama doing death penalty work and post-conviction work in the '80s. One of those was a guy named Bob Morin, who came back and was a D.C. Superior Court judge. I read this article about Kirk, and at that time, he had been exonerated and Bob Morin had represented him post-conviction, but there was still some questions about who committed the crime and some suspicions that the Baltimore County state’s attorney and police had. Anyway, it sounded like a pretty interesting story, so I called up Bob who was a friend of mine and asked him if he would give me an introduction to Kirk, and that’s how it got started.

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Walk me through what the process of researching and writing the book was like and how long it took.

It took me a little while to get Kirk’s trust because he had been through some people that made him promises about things, but eventually I was able to do that. I told him that if he would work with me on this, I would share some of the royalties with him, but I wouldn’t give him any editorial input or rights because in the beginning, I didn’t know where it was going to lead, and I wanted to write an objective book. He agreed to that and so I probably spent a week or 10 days with him and recorded most of what his story was, and then I began doing a lot of research.

There were actually two criminal trials he was involved with. The first one he was convicted and sentenced to death, and then it was reversed on appeal, and he was convicted a second time with a different lawyer. There was a lot of press. There was coverage every day in the Baltimore Sun, for example, of the case, and then Bob Morin had all of the transcripts from the trials and also from the grand jury, which was incredibly helpful. Then I went out and I interviewed everybody who would speak to me.

I interviewed both of the different judges who were involved in his case, and I interviewed the different state’s attorneys who tried the case. Pretty much everybody spoke to me except for the two homicide detectives who were responsible for his arrest. But I had all of their notes, and I had all of their grand jury testimony that I’d gotten from Bob Morin, the lawyer, so I was really in a place where I had a really comprehensive picture and I could write the story. I’d say the research took about seven or eight months, and the book was pretty easy to write once I had the whole picture in front of me.

I was probably about two-thirds through the book when Kirk called me all choked up because he had been trying for years, really, to get the state’s attorney in Baltimore County to put the DNA that exonerated him into a state and national database that had been building. He had gotten Barry Scheck to help him and some other people, and finally they did it and they called him and went down to see him … It was a pretty amazing sequence of events. They had an absolute match. Up until that point, the state’s attorney, the police kept making noises that maybe there were several people who committed the crime and that they weren’t sure Kirk was innocent and all this kind of stuff. They finally got an absolute match on the DNA, and it was a man who was in the same prison here as Kirk for five years and lifted weights with him. They came up, and they came to his house. Everybody was crying. They told him they realized it was never him. It wasn’t him. They had arrested the man. He had given a false statement and so forth.

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Was there anything that you learned or encountered during the process of doing your research that you found particularly surprising?

There were all kinds of little miracles that we discovered in the research of the book that were absolutely incredible. For example, when Bob Morin agreed to take Kirk’s case, normally, based on the protocols in the Baltimore County court system, after, I think, three years or five years after the appeals are exhausted, the evidence is typically destroyed to make room for new evidence.

DNA was brand new. It was a brand new technology, but the only way it might help Kirk was if they found items of clothing or items from the crime scene. That second judge, it turned out, had been so uncomfortable with the evidence that he had sequestered the young girls’ clothes in his chamber closet and kept them there for five years. Bob was able to somehow find out through some people in the courthouse that the evidence still existed, which it shouldn’t have. That was one little kind of miracle. Then, the whole story is sort of what Kirk began to do afterwards. He went through some really difficult times, but then he began to be a real advocate for removing the death penalty or getting rid of the death penalty. He became really well known. 

Between the hardback and the paperback, the paperback’s got an addendum to it. A number of things happened which were incredible … He was in the Marine Corps when he was 19 and a waterman, a blue collar fellow. So Sir Alec Jeffreys, who was knighted in Great Britain because he was the discoverer of the DNA fingerprint, when he was being awarded this huge award in Europe in front of a televised audience of like 12 million people, they flew Kirk Bloodsworth out from Maryland to London to present the award to Sir Alec Jeffreys. That was sort of the story of what Kirk was able to do with his life.

It’s hard to explain what happens to a man when he’s deprived of his freedom from being 19 to 30 and told when to wake up and when to have his dinner and when to get exercise and never thinks for himself and never learns how to do those things. But he was able to not only do that, but he went around with a number of the social justice groups and spoke and lobbied for a bill in Congress to provide funding for federal prisoners who met certain criteria so that they could get their DNA tested. At one point, it had passed the House, and it was bottlenecked in the Senate. Kirk took 100 books to the Senate and gave one to every senator. Two weeks later, the bill passed. It was given his name.

He also was very active with getting rid of the death penalty in Maryland. When we went on tour after I wrote the book, Kirk went with me for about a month. I was on tour for a couple months, but we’d go around the country and he was like the poster child for exonerated felons and people on death row from DNA. People would line up for hours to get his autograph and give him a hug. There were just all kinds of amazing things to this story that came out during the research and during the writing of it.

RELATED: Va. man in prison for killing wife seeks DNA test

Were there things you were able to uncover in your research and include in the book that hadn't been included in earlier reporting on the case that helped you develop the comprehensive, objective narrative you talked about?

Having access to the grand jury transcripts, which otherwise would have been private, and as part of certain discovery rules, Bob Morin was able to get the actual notes from the detectives and being able to speak to the state’s attorneys who tried the case, I really tried to present the crime and the investigation of the crime and why they focused on Kirk as objectively as possible so people could understand how that happened and how easily it happened. There were a number of things which I uncovered in my research, which Kirk certainly didn’t know anything about, like the judge sequestering the clothes in his closet and a number of crime insights that Bob Morin gave me and things like that.

I think we were able to develop a really objective and well-rounded picture, and I think that’s part of the force of the book is that even though I have a point of view of the death penalty, I just wrote the book as objectively as possible so that people could see the story and see exactly how this could happen because I think that the message is that much stronger when you do it that way. Those are the facts, and you let the facts speak for themselves, which is what I tried to do.

What are some of the most significant lessons you hope readers take with them after finishing the book?

I’ve had a lot of people read the book and said it changed their views on the death penalty, which is gratifying to me. Kirk, when he was convicted the first time, I think the jury was out for 40 minutes and when he was sentenced to death, a packed courtroom gave a standing ovation. It was a horrible, horrible crime of a 9-year-old girl being raped and murdered in a suburban community in Baltimore, and when you have a crime like that, there’s tremendous pressure on the authorities to find who did it because the entire community is terrified. I think that’s one of the things that comes out in the book. They were absolutely sure they had the right person, but there is that sort of added. Then think if you’re a juror in that situation. Are you going to let somebody go who’s been indicted by a grand jury and the prosecutors believe did this kind of a crime. I think most juries would rather err on convicting an innocent person almost than let the possibility of such a monster go free, right? So there’s a lot of interesting lessons from the book. I tried to write it not like a legal treatise, but like a crime thriller so people would enjoy it, and I think most people who’ve read it felt like they couldn’t put it down, which is nice too.

Is there anything else you'd like to add about the book or being chosen as the One Maryland One Book selection for 2018?

I was in some great company with Bryan Stevenson and Jesmyn Ward. I was quite surprised. Of course, their books are a little more contemporary in the sense that they’ve been published in the last year or two … It’s nice to see that books have their own lives in some way, so I was very delighted to learn the news.

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