NEW YORK—When Termaine Hicks saw the hundreds of dates that composed his portrait, “December 16, 2020” immediately jumped out at him. That was the day he walked free after 19 years of wrongful imprisonment.
“I remember that day like it was yesterday,” Hicks told The Epoch Times.
Hicks is one of 251 people freed or exonerated from wrongful conviction through the assistance of the Innocence Project. He is also one of the first to have his likeness captured by Brazilian artist Vik Muniz as part of a collaboration series with Innocence Project.
Four portraits were displayed at the Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery in West Chelsea on the eve of Oct. 2.
“I feel like at the end of their story, they are people who still believe in life. They were affected by their experience, but in a positive way,” Muniz told The Epoch Times.
In conversations with Hicks and through reviewing the letters he wrote as well as court documents, Muniz was struck by the scale of bureaucracy.
“They’re just dates, dates, dates, dates ... and the date in the document is probably very different than what the dates represent to him,” he said.
“I just kept wondering about the dates in the documents and the passing of time; that’s probably the most painful and most difficult thing.”
Muniz decided to use document clippings to create the exonerees’ portraits, highlighting significant dates.
Wednesday’s exhibition featured the portraits of Hicks; Rosa Jimenez, who was wrongfully incarcerated after the accidental death of a child; Michelle Murphy, who was wrongfully convicted for the murder of her infant son until DNA testing proved her innocence; and Felipe Rodriguez, who was wrongfully convicted for a murder he did not commit.
“What’s always struck me about exonerees is that when they come out, they have such incredible equanimity and not anger,” said Steve Reiss, attorney and co-chair of the portrait collaboration event.
Overturning, Preventing Wrongful Convictions
Sometime in 2001, when Hicks was a 26-year-old father of one at the time, he heard a woman screaming and ran over to help her. He found the woman badly beaten and called the police, but when they arrived, they shot him three times in the back.The police had made a mistake but pressed ahead with the case. Hicks was wrongfully accused of rape and put on trial, where 19 members of the Philadelphia Police Department testified against him.
Because he was innocent, Hicks believed he would be acquitted. Instead, the jury returned a guilty verdict.
Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, represented Hicks during the exoneration process and said the key to proving his innocence was the medical record that refuted police claims that Hicks had a gun and was coming at them, causing them to shoot him three times from the front. At trial, Hicks’s original lawyer did not have an expert who could testify that he was shot three times in the back.
It was only after a new administration that the district attorney’s office agreed to reopen the case, Neufeld said, subsequently vacating the conviction because of the medical records.
Neufeld said cases like Hicks’s are rare—many wrongful convictions happen because of mistaken witness testimony, but Hicks’s case uncovered “overt police corruption.” Police had knowingly lied on the witness stand to cover for the misconduct of a colleague, he added.
More importantly, Hicks’s case presented an opportunity for reform.
Founded in 1992, Neufeld and attorney Barry Scheck had the idea of examining cases using DNA evidence but did not expect the project would grow into an international movement. After a few cases, they were featured on an afternoon TV program, which happened to be shown in prisons across the United States. First, hundreds of letters poured in, Neufeld said, and then thousands followed.
Today, the organization has inspired dozens of similar nonprofits and more than 1.2 million advocates. It also has a policy arm and has helped pass more than 250 state and federal criminal justice reform laws.
“When we started doing this kind of work, we didn’t know what kind of impact it would have. But what’s extraordinary is that the stories like Termaine’s become the impetus for reform in the criminal legal system,” Neufeld pointed out.
Throughout it all, Hicks displayed incredible patience and spirit, Neufeld said.
‘God Kept Me Alive for a Reason’
After Hicks was shot, he woke up in the hospital, handcuffed to the bed. Recovery was a solo endeavor: he taught himself to walk again while handcuffed, progressing from a wheelchair to a walker and finally to a cane. There was no physical therapy, and his surgery was a botched effort where a surgical sponge was left in his chest, requiring another surgery to remove it.“I guess that’s where my resilience comes from,” he said as he laughed. “I survived. I was shot three times in my back. I’m not paralyzed. I didn’t die—God kept me around for a reason.”
Having survived a near-death experience, he was intent on thriving despite wrongful imprisonment.
“I was going to build myself up physically, spiritually, mentally,” he said.
His faith, creative writing, and workouts helped him stay balanced and determined to prove his innocence.
Hicks said he was initially prepared to appeal his own case and, if he ran out of options, to serve his full sentence and prove his innocence afterward. It was a pleasant surprise when the Innocence Project took his case eight years into his sentencing. When it took them another 12 years to get him out of prison, he was only ever patient, positive, and grateful.
“This could have easily been the 23rd anniversary of my death,” said Hicks, a motivational speaker and founder of Step Up, a mentorship program for at-risk youth.
A Voice for the Silenced
Hicks, Rodriguez, and Murphy all said they never for a moment lost faith. However, Murphy said, at times, “hope ran thin ... real thin.”At age 17, Murphy was a mother of a 2-year-old daughter and an infant son. Her son was brutally murdered, and a distressing, hours-long police interrogation in the aftermath coerced a confession, she said.
In 2014, Murphy became the first woman in Oklahoma to be exonerated by DNA—her DNA wasn’t present at the crime scene, but the blood of an unknown male was.
Her daughter became her north star. Murphy was determined to one day prove her innocence to her daughter, who had been adopted by an associate of Murphy’s prosecuting attorney.
“My hope was getting to her and proving to her that I was not the monster the world had portrayed me to be,” Murphy told The Epoch Times.
Murphy was incarcerated for 20 years, during which her mother wrote unceasingly to Project Innocence until her death, after which Murphy’s best friend picked up the torch. Local attorneys were eventually able to pick up the case.
“I felt like somebody was finally hearing my voice,” she said of attorneys Sharisse and Richard O'Carroll. The wrongful conviction had felt like her vocal chord was ripped out, she said, silencing her even though she knew she was innocent and that the blood at the crime scene was not hers.
When Murphy was released from prison, she felt like she had entered a whole new world. When she had been incarcerated, she had never driven a car, but upon her release, she saw that cars were now driving themselves. While she felt relieved to be free, she also felt a deep sorrow, knowing that many others had been wrongfully convicted, just like she had been.
For five years, Murphy worked at the same court that imprisoned her. Like many exonerees, she is an ardent advocate for the Innocence Project.
Murphy reconnected with her daughter as well, and is now a grandmother.
Path of Justice
In 1990, Rodriguez was convicted of a 1987 murder, with reinvestigation decades later uncovering that he was convicted based on false testimony.After 24 years of incarceration, Rodriguez received a commutation of his sentence—but three years later, the Queens County Supreme Court vacated the conviction entirely, as the case was built on weak evidence and the coerced testimony of another suspect in the case.
Rodriguez was imprisoned for 27 years and nine months, nearly three decades of his life, but harbors no ill will.
“I believe in destiny,” he told The Epoch Times.
When Rodriguez was first wrongfully accused, it set off a “monster of a tsunami in my brain” and the “beginning of the nightmare of: ‘Why me? Where did I go wrong? How did I end up here?’” he said.
“You see, the years go by, and nobody’s helping you out. It comes to a point where your mind is struggling, starts playing tricks on yourself,” he said. “So what do you do? You cut your losses.”
Seeking revenge is digging two graves, Rodriguez said, and he had to let go of all resentment.
“Hate, resentment, animosity, vindictiveness, those are all cancers,” he said. “You are the captain of your ship. It'll sink if you let it sink.
“If I would have lost faith, I would have been done. That is the last thing you lose in life,” he said. “You can lose anything in life, but you can’t lose faith.”
Rodriguez told himself that the United States’s judicial system could only be effective if people made it so, and decided to hold the system to the standard it claims to uphold. He believed that fate had led him to this point and that it was his destiny to pave a path that would show people what true justice is.
The day he walked free, it was drizzly and gray, with an eerie feeling of mourning, Rodriguez said.
“That was God saying to me: ‘You’ve been to hell and back. This is where you’re born. Today’s the day you’re born. Go forward,’” he said.
“To everybody, to the world: Do not hate, do not blame anyone for the things that happen in your life ... we must carry our lives with dignity, respect, and with the hope that all things come to pass, and we can be good.”
