It is totally unimaginable to contemplate the horror of spending 27 years in prison for a crime you did not commit.
Somehow, some way, a talented artist named Valentino Dixon survived that ordeal, survived that unfathomable injustice.
In his case, justice wasn’t blind, she totally turned her back on a young man nearly three decades ago.
On August 10, 1991, Valentino Dixon’s world would begin to crumble.
Here’s what transpired on a street in Buffalo, N.Y.
Two brothers — Torriano and Aaron Jackson jumped out of a yellow car in front of Louie’s Texas Red Hots restaurant at the intersection of East Delevan and Bailey Avenue in Buffalo. The two men then proceeded to fight with another named Mario Jarmon in front of the restaurant resulting in multiple gunshots being fired.
After the shooting, Torriano Jackson laid dead, Mario Jarmon and Aaron Jackson were both critically wounded, and another bystander John Sullivan lay injured after being grazed in the leg by a stray bullet. Several guns were found at the scene of the crime, though the police could not discover their owner.
The police arrested Valentino Dixon for murdering Torriano and shooting the other three victims. Valentino became a suspect because of an anonymous tip that falsely said that Valentino shot Torriano over a girl.
On August 12, 1991, just two days after the shooting, Lamarr Scott confessed to shooting Torriano Jackson in self-defense. Lamarr said he came to help Mario Jarman after the Jackson brothers opened fire on his friends. Detective Mark Stambach took Lamarr’s statement. Lamarr was not taken into custody.
Despite the real shooter’s confession, the detective continued to pursue Valentino and built a case against him based solely on the word of three men: Emil Adams, John Sullivan, and Aaron Jackson. Valentino was found guilty and sentenced to 33 years to life with no chance for parole before 2030. He was sent to Attica, one of our nation’s worst prisons.
It would prove to be one of the greatest miscarriages of justice anyone could imagine.
There was prosecutorial malpractice, when you consider how things went down and how witnesses who might have exonerated Dixon were not allowed to testify.
There was no physical evidence, no DNA evidence. Reasonable doubt should have been obvious.
But so much went wrong and Dixon was behind bars until he was finally exonerated of the crimes and released from prison on September 19th of this year.
Dixon was exonerated after Lamarr Scott pleaded guilty to manslaughter and assault charges. Scott confessed to investigators after the shooting, but they didn’t believe him, instead thinking Dixon’s family forced him to confess.
Scott is currently serving time for an unrelated attempted murder charge.
On Tuesday evening, The Golf Channel aired its special: 27 Years: The Exoneration Of Valentino Dixon.
Dixon survived with an attitude that most would find hard to imagine:
“I counted my blessings and I was grateful to God. I saw people on the outside suffering, I was children with cancer. I was healthy and had this talent,” he said after becoming a free man.
“This talent” was his artwork.
His life began to change when the warden asked him to do a drawing of the 12th hole at Augusta National, the warden’s favorite golf hole. He did that and more, a lot more. He drew magnificent renderings of golf courses he had never seen.
His work drew major attention. There were stories in Golf Digest and another by NBC with host Jimmy Roberts.
His case drew the attention of a Georgetown University law professor and his class put together a project that would eventually lead to the re-opening of the case and the exoneration of Dixon.
Seems like it took forever but this wrong was finally righted and Dixon was set free.
He’s not bitter and he’s ready to make use of that talent of his.
And now, he can really count his blessings — as a free man.
In the meantime, he was able to visit Pebble Beach for the first time, to take in the beauty he had only imagined from the confines of an eight by eleven prison cell.
