Robert DuBoise was 18 years old when the Tampa, Florida, police arrested him for a crime he had not committed. 🚔
In 1983, they murdered 19-year-old Barbara Grams as she was walking home from work. Without solid evidence, a forensic dentist testified under oath that Robert’s teeth matched a bite mark on the victim’s body. He used a beeswax mold that decades later was proven to be invalid. That was enough to sentence him first to death and later to life in prison.
He spent 37 years behind bars until the Innocence Project reopened his case in 2018. DNA evidence that did not exist in the 80s identified two other men as the real perpetrators. Robert was released in 2020, at 55, to rebuild a life that had been taken from him when he was barely a teenager. In 2024, Tampa awarded him 14 million dollars in compensation, but no amount of money can give him back the decades he lost because of an error that should never have cost him his freedom. ⚖️