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A psychiatrist who treated the star witness against Darnell Williams in his capital murder trial has provided the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law an affidavit that strongly suggests that the wrong man is on death row.

Just one day after the 1986 murders of Henrietta and John Rease inside their Indiana home, the witness, Derrick Bryant, who was a foster son of the couple, talked with psychiatrist Dr. Judith Stoewe, implicating his foster brother Edwin Taylor, rather than Williams, who Bryant later accused of the crime in court.

"The more we learned about this case — first about the exculpatory DNA and now about this newly uncovered evidence — the more we felt we had to help," said Rob Warden, executive director at the Center on Wrongful Convictions.

The center is now providing support to Williams' defense team as Williams sits on death row awaiting an imminent ruling by the Indiana Supreme Court on his case.

At the time of the trial Dr. Stoewe was the attending psychiatrist at Hartgrove Hospital , where Indiana authorities placed Bryant after the murders. Her affidavit states that Bryant told her, "I saw my friend kill my foster parents." He went on to say that "Ed and his friends" committed the crime, referring to Taylor, his friend and foster brother.

Taylor, who admitted that the robbery of the Reases was his idea, made an agreement with prosecutors to testify against Williams in exchange for the dropping of all charges against him.

The affidavit also reveals that Bryant told staff at the psychiatric hospital that "he knows who killed his foster parents but can't tell authorities." He made this statement to Hargrove Hospital staff less than two weeks after he implicated Williams to police and agreed to testify against him.

These statements are documented in Bryant's newly discovered records at Hartgrove, where Bryant was placed under the supervision of his case worker in conjunction with the prosecutor in the case. The trial judge agreed to a full review all of Bryant's welfare records and to provide any exculpatory evidence to the defense. The Indiana welfare authorities claimed that the full record had been provided to the judge for his confidential review. But after Bryant's death, Williams' lawyer obtained a waiver from Bryant's family for the release of all records and discovered this newly uncovered evidence.

"The case has classic signs of problems — heavy reliance on the testimony of accomplices with great incentive to shift blame to others, an unreliable witness with a grudge against the defendant — and now we know there was no forensic evidence," said Warden.

"Yet, despite the DNA results and this newly found evidence, prosecutors continue to insist that testimony from Bryant and Taylor is enough to support the conviction and death sentence," he said.

The case gained national attention when the trial prosecutor and former juror supported Williams in his effort to obtain DNA testing and urged that his death sentence be vacated when the DNA results were exculpatory.

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