"Coming Back to Life: One Man's Story of Wrongful Conviction"
1,106 views · Published 14 November 2012 · 1:05:47 · Indexed 25 October 2026
Channel: Vanderbilt University · 2012 · Education
Watch video of Ndume Olatushani and Anne-Marie Moyes in conversation with Lisa Guenther, associate professor of philosophy, as part of the Thinking Out of the Lunchbox lecture series. Ndume Olatushani was wrongly convicted of capital murder in 1985. After spending 20 years on Tennessee's death row, his death sentence was overturned and he was resentenced to life imprisonment. Though no longer facing execution, Mdume was still at risk of spending the remainder of his life behind bars. Fortunately, his dedicated attorneys believed strongly in his innocence and never gave up their fight to free him. Finally, in December 2011, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his conviction in response to mounting evidence of his innocence. On June 1, 2012, Ndume walked out of the Memphis County Jail, a free man. Anne-Marie Moyes met Ndume in 1992 while working for an organization dedicated to abolishing the death penalty. She soon became his strongest advocate. She helped him to recruit a large law firm to take his case pro bono, raised public awareness of his cause, and conducted a two-year-long investigation of his case that uncovered powerful new evidence of his innocence. She graduated from Vanderbilt Law School in 2002 and currently works as an attorney with the Federal Public Defender's Office in Nashville. She and Ndume were married in July of this year, shortly after his release.
