A very bad day for Johnny Princeton. A very bad night for me.

The police said Johnny Princeton shot and killed a convenience store clerk during a robbery in far northeast Dallas that netted him $12.50.

The police said he robbed a service station next, wounding the owner in a shoot out and pointed a gun at a Korean woman and her children at a bus stop just down the street, until she handed over her purse that had $35 in total in it.

The police said that Johnny Princeton was the man who did these crimes. 

They found a three year old picture of him from their files, put it with some other photographs of local hoods and cops alike and showed it to the store clerk’s assistant, the service station manager and the Korean woman.

Not one of them picked Johnny Princeton out of the photo lineup on the first pass.  Only two did with prompting. That simple fact never came to light until after Johnny Princeton’s trial.

The reason the police believed that Johnny Princeton was their man was that witnesses said a bright orange Plymouth Barracuda was the getaway car used. And Johnny Princeton had a bright orange Barracuda.  Notice the past tense of the verb-had. At the time of the robbery, Johnny Princeton no longer owned the bright orange Barracuda.  He had sold it to Marcellus Wilkins, his cousin on his mother’s side of the family, for $600 and Marcellus had the car with him in Houston where he worked for a furniture warehouse. Half of the car money was on Johnny’s  possession when the police arrested him.  They claimed the cash came from a string of armed robberies in which he had participated.

They never found the 9mm Glock that was used to kill Gwen Nao at the C store or the one that was used to shoot James Donald at the service station.

The police were even thwarted in their attempt to place Johnny there by seven eye witnesses who said that at the time of the crimes, Johnny was with them at a basketball game at South Oak Cliff, almost eleven miles from the scene of the killing.

There was even DISD (Dallas Independent School District) surveillance cameras in the school’s parking lot that proved the witnesses’ story. But that evidence was suppressed by the prosecutor.

But still the police arrested Johnny Princeton for the crime and the district attorney prosecuted him and a jury of Dallas County citizens voted to take his life through the use of poisons injected into his veins.

And then I woke up in a cold sweat.

Oh my God, it was just a dream. A bad nightmare.

This is America it could never happen here.

This is Texas, never on our watch would that occur.

This is Dallas County, my home county, we couldn’t send an innocent man to die or to have life in prison based on faulty evidence or on shoddy police and prosecutorial actions.

Not here.  Not now.  Only in my worst dreams. Only.