After spending more than 20 years in prison for a crime he insists he didn’t commit, Maurice A. Caldwell says, “I want to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
Caldwell, 44, spoke to a group of about 40 residents of The Redwoods, a senior citizen residence in Mill Valley. He was accompanied by Paige Kaneb, an attorney for The Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law, who helped him gain his freedom.
“If they had used common sense, I wouldn’t have gone to prison,” Caldwell said.
During his 20 years and six months of incarceration, he said he served time at various prisons, including San Quentin, New Folsom, Old Folsom, Mule Creek and Pleasant Valley.
“I used to be angry every day, but that’s what made me fight more,” he said. Among numerous letters pleading for help was one to the Innocence Project, which took on the challenge.
Asked about his life now, Caldwell said, “Every day is a struggle. I’m fighting for my humanity.” As a free man, he said he’s ineligible for the kind of assistance offered to parolees.
Caldwell reported he’s trying to get money from a state fund which pays wrongly convicted persons $100 a day for every day in prison. That would total almost $750,000.
He was convicted in 1991 of second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of a man near his apartment in the Alemany housing project in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco during a botched drug deal. The key witness against him was a neighbor who initially said he wasn’t involved but later identified him as the shooter. The sentence: 27 years to life.
The city honored the witness with a medal, a key to the city, $1,000 and a trip to Disneyland. She died while Caldwell was imprisoned.
His sentence was tossed out due to incompetent representation (his attorney was subsequently disbarred because of similar problems with other cases), because of failure to question other witnesses who said Caldwell was innocent, because evidence was destroyed and the key witness was deceased.
Another key element was the Innocence Project found that a man imprisoned in Nevada admitted he was the shooter.
Caldwell walked out of prison a free man on March 28, 2011, into the arms of his sister. His mother and grandmother died while he was locked up.
Kaneb has handled the case since 2008. “Maurice is not only innocent, but a wonderful client and an appreciative person who has kept his faith throughout this whole ordeal,” she said in a 2010 interview.
He could have been freed weeks earlier if he had accepted a prosecution deal to plead guilty to reduced charges. “He turned it down right away,” said Kaneb. “He made this great statement, on the record actually, that he’s been fighting this case for 20 years, and if he were one percent involved he would have taken this deal and walked, but he was 100 percent innocent and wouldn’t take the deal.”
