Ty Alper

The first time I met him was down at Holman.

I was by myself and I was going to go down and

make sure that he was okay with us representing him, and to sort of tell him where his case was.

And I remember saying to him, you know, Mr. Johnson, I want you to know we're at the very early stages of your appeals.

There's many rounds of appeals to go.

We're going to file a petition in the U.S.

Supreme Court.

Then we're going to go back into state court.

If we lose there, we're going to go back into federal court.

And all this could take many years.

And he just started crying.

And I assumed that he was upset because I knew that he was claiming he was innocent.

And I assumed that he was upset that this was going to take so long.

And I asked him what was wrong, and he said that he was so happy because he had just assumed that they could come any minute and take him to be executed.

And it was just the thing that struck me the most because not only had he been screwed over in pretty much every possible way you can be, but nobody was telling him anything about what was going on in his case.

So we knew that that was a potentially fruitful area to investigate because she was the state's whole case.

We knew the reward was offered because it was all over the papers, but we didn't know who got it or if Violet Ellison got it.

So the next step was, okay, well, were there questions about her credibility that the jury never heard?

And an obvious one was, well, was she paid for her testimony?

I do remember us all hovering around the fax machine waiting to see what it was because it was the first time that anyone had acknowledged that there might be something that was helpful.