Tennessee Couple Exonerated After Serving 27 Years Behind Bars For Wrongful Murder and Rape Convictions

Wrongful convictions are a problem within the country’s justice system. A problem Joyce Watkins knows firsthand.

For nearly 35 years, Watkins has insisted that she was innocent and that she never harmed her 4-year-old great-niece who died years ago.

But a juror still found her and her boyfriend, Charlie Dunn guilty of aggravated rape and murder of the child.

However, this month, Watkins’ pleas of innocence were finally heard. A judge agreed with her and exonerated both her and Dunn’s convictions. Unfortunately, Dunn died while incarcerated.

Sadly, both served 27 years behind bars, PEOPLE reported.

“I’m just happy to be out of this mess, which has cost me half of my life for nothing,” Watkins, now 74, said after her charges were dismissed, a news release from the Tennessee Innocence Project stated. “But I’ll get over it. I thank God for me being able to do this.”

On June 27, 1987, Watkins took the unresponsive girl to a Nashville hospital the morning after she and Dunn picked up the child at the home of another relative in Kentucky.

The young girl died the next day.

ER doctors determined the 4-year-old suffered from severe vaginal injury and head trauma, according to a 45-page report by the Conviction Review Unit of the Nashville District Attorney General’s Office.

A medical examiner testified at trial that the injuries had to have occurred during the nine hours the child was with Watkins and Dunn.

The couple was convicted in 1988 and a jury sentenced them to life in prison for the murder, with a concurrent 60-year sentence for the aggravated rape charge.

Dunn died in 2015. Later that year Watkins was granted parole and released from prison. However, she still bore the burden of being a convicted killer and was required to register with the state as a sex offender.

Watkins was determined to clear her name and went to the Tennessee Innocence Project to seek their assistance.

Jason Gichner, the project’s senior counsel, said the case against Watkins “didn’t make any sense from the start.”

“Joyce and Charlie were in their 40’s, they had full-time jobs, they’d never been in any trouble before. Then you meet Joyce, and you’re like, there’s no way.”

“Their families never thought they did this,” he added. Even the child’s mother, who sent her daughter to live with a relative in Kentucky for two months before Watkins and Dunn picked her up, “always believed that Joyce was innocent.”

“The jury had their hands tied,” says Gichner. “They hear from a medical examiner who says that these injuries must have happened during this window of time when she was only with Joyce and Charlie. And that’s just dead wrong.”

In the reviews of Watkins’ case, the prosecutor’s office special review unit and the Tennessee Innocence Project discovered that during the two months before the girl’s death, there were abuse allegations in the home from which Watkins and Dunn had picked her up. However, a child welfare worker who looked into the allegations had accepted the relative’s explanation of the alleged physical abuse as “playground injuries,” and as a result closed the investigation, according to the unit’s review.

As both parties dug deeper, the unit and Tennessee Innocence Project cited flaws in the original prosecution, which included alleged withholding and destruction of evidence that was favorable to Watkins and Dunn. They also showed that medical advances unraveled the coroner’s claims about the timing of the child’s injuries.

“This was bad science,” says Eaton. “And it was faulty testimony by a later discredited medical examiner.”

Judge Angelita Blackshear Dalton, who overturned the convictions on Jan. 6 after reviewing both petitions from the prosecutor’s unit and the Tennessee Innocence Project, agreed with their findings and noted in her ruling that the medical examiner, Dr. Gretel Harlan, had acknowledged mistakes in her methodology.

“The inaccurate medical opinions, presented in the context of erroneous circumstantial evidence, led the jury and court to rely on inaccurate and misleading information,” the judge wrote. “In short, the evidence, in this case, supports the claim that Joyce Watkins and Charlie Dunn are innocent and were convicted of crimes they did not commit.”

District Attorney General Glenn Funk released a statement: “My office strives to do justice always. That means recognizing that wrongful convictions, while rare, have occurred and must be remedied. We cannot give Ms. Watkins or Mr. Dunn their lost years but we can restore their dignity. Their innocence demands it.”

Dunn’s daughter, Jackie Dunn, also made a statement after the news of her father’s exoneration, “I wish my daddy was here to witness this day,” reports Nashville TV station WTVF. “He knew he was innocent, he knew he did not commit those crimes.”

“A lot of tears were shed over this case,” Sunny Eaton, the unit’s director said. “It was a tragedy on all sides. To think about what Ms. Watkins and Mr. Dunn lost, once we were shown the new medical evidence and when we considered all the factors that led to their original conviction, their innocence was so crystal clear. The medical evidence here was irrefutable.”

Gichner says the case now remains unsolved. “Joyce and Charlie were not with the child,” he says, “so we don’t know what happened, tragically.”