Overview

In 1983, a fourteen-year-old boy named DeWitt Duckett was killed in a school hallway in Baltimore. Within days, three Black teenagers were arrested, tried, and convicted of his murder. They would spend the next 36 years in prison for a crime they did not commit. This deeply reported documentary narrative traces the full arc of one of the longest wrongful imprisonments in history; from the chaotic aftermath of Duckett's death, through coerced witness testimony and systemic failure, to the moment the truth finally emerged decades later. Drawing on court records, investigative reporting, witness recantations, and firsthand accounts, this book reveals how fear replaced facts, how urgency eclipsed justice, and how the legal system failed not just three innocent boys, but a grieving family searching for truth. At the heart of the story is Ron Bishop, a teenage witness whose coerced testimony helped secure the convictions, and whose later recantation became one of the crucial cracks that reopened the case. This is not only a story of injustice. It is a story of stolen youth, moral reckoning, and the enduring consequences of a system that chose certainty over truth. Written with emotional restraint and factual rigor, When a Witness Recants honors every life touched by the case, including the one that was lost, and asks the question that still haunts the justice system: What happens when the system gets it wrong and refuses to look back? If you believe justice should be based on truth, not convenience, this book is for you. Read the story behind the headlines. Witness the cost of a wrongful conviction. And remember the lives forever changed when justice failed to listen.

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