No Happy Ending

By John E. Gallagher

The plot has all the elements of an old-fashioned detective movie. A police officer is brutally gunned down and a frantic manhunt ensues. A long-haired laborer is convicted of the murder after his companion on the fateful night testifies against him. A filmmaker becomes obsessed with the case and produces a gritty documentary in which the prosecution's witnesses shed doubt on their own testimony. Ideally, there should be a happy cinematic ending, as the wrongly convicted man leaves prison after twelve years to resume his shattered life.

But last week a Texas parole board decided that happy endings are only for movies. By a 2-to-1 vote, the board refused to release Randall Adams, whose plight director Errol Morris publicized in his documentary The Thin Blue Line, which has enjoyed a cultlike popularity since its release last summer. Despite a lower-court recommendation at a hearing last December that Adams be retried, and even though the companion who accused him has all but confessed to the murder, the board concluded that the heinous nature of the crime dictated that Adams should remain in prison.

Adams' ordeal began during Thanksgiving weekend in 1976, when 16-year-old David Harris offered him a lift. The two spent the day tooling around Dallas, ending up at a drive-in. Adams claims that Harris dropped him off at his motel around 10 p.m. Harris testified that they left the drive-in about midnight, with Adams driving Harris' stolen car. When police officer Robert Wood pulled the car over, Harris said, Adams pulled out a .22 pistol and fired five shots into the policeman. (It was later learned that Harris had previously stolen the weapon.)

The Dallas police interrogated Harris after they heard that he had been boasting to friends about killing a policeman. Nonetheless, when Harris fingered Adams, the police believed him. Within six months, Adams was convicted and sentenced to die. Later Governor William Clements commuted his sentence to life.

Enter Errol Morris. While making a documentary in 1985 about a psychiatrist who testifies in death-penalty cases, the director stumbled across Adams' story. "I was interested enough that I wanted the details," Morris recalls. What he found in the prosecutor's files shocked him. The slain officer's partner, who testified that the killer had bushy hair like Adams', had at first told investigators that the car window "was too dirty to see through." Prosecutor Doug Mulder argued that the defense could not cross-examine a witness because she was traveling. In fact, she was staying at a Dallas hotel, possibly with the prosecutor's knowledge. She revealed to Morris that she had failed to pick Adams out of a lineup.

Perhaps the most chilling part of the movie is Harris' virtual confession to the crime. Harris, who is on death row for a 1985 murder, tells Morris that he is sure Adams is innocent "because I'm the one who knows." At the December hearing, Harris admitted that he was alone and holding the gun when it went off. Mulder, who has since left the D.A.'s office, discounts the admission. Says he: "Before it's all said and done, he'll recant again." Still, prosecutors have not contested the December recommendation.

The parole board is not scheduled to reconsider Adams' case until December 1990. While he awaits final word on a new trial, Adams remains hopeful. "Eventually, I will win," he says. Meanwhile, Morris' documentary continues to gain attention and praise. The Thin Blue Line has won awards from the New York Film Critics' Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. What it has yet to win is Randall Adams' release.

With reporting by Lianne Hart/Houston and Leslie Whitaker/New York