Robert DuBoise was jailed for the murder of Barbara Grams, 19, in 1983 but 37 years later DNA evidence finally cleared his name by linking two other men to the killing
An innocent man who was sentenced to death for a murder he didn't commit and ended up spending nearly four decades behind bars has spoken out about how it felt like a "bad dream" but revealed he's "not bitter" about the ordeal.
Robert DuBoise was just 18 years old when 19-year-old Barbara Grams was raped and beaten to death in August 1983 as she walked home from her restaurant job in Tampa, Florida. The murder case hinged on a wound on Barbara's cheek which a medical examiner determined was a bite mark.
While police had no clear suspects, a gas station clerk near the scene of the murder had pointed to Robert as part of a group known to "cause problems." Investigators took bite samples from a number of men, including Robert, and a forensic dentist determined his teeth matched the mark on Barbara's cheek.
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Robert was convicted of the murder and initially sentenced to death, although his sentence was later reduced to life in prison. It wasn't until 2018 that the Innocence Project Organization managed to get prosecutors to take another look at the case.
DNA testing that wasn't available during the early 1980s pointed toward two other murder - Amos Robinson and Abron Scott. Both men were already serving life prison sentences for a different killing.
In 2020 Robert was finally released from prison. By then he'd spent 37 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.
Despite this, Robert says he's learnt to not hold onto any anger. He recently took to Reddit with Tampa Bay journalists Christopher Spata and Dan Sullivan to answer questions about his experience.
When asked how he gets over the anger of it all, Robert responded: "There’s a lot of people angry for me because I won’t be. I don’t let anger control my life or my mind like that. I chose not to be bitter. I don’t want to hate anybody, and I don’t.
"So instead I choose to have compassion. When I was locked up I was dumbfounded. How’d this happen to me? How am I sitting in a death row cell? It was like I was in a bad dream I couldn’t wake up from. I was in defence mode, trying to think of any way I could to prove my innocence. But I wasn’t angry. And I’ve seen what hatred does to people in prison."
The now 59-year-old revealed that despite having his parole denied numerous times, he continued to always hold out hope that he would one day clear his name. "I did keep my faith that I was going to be proven innocent. At some point, especially after the third parole hearing that was denied, I had to think to myself even if I die here, I just want the truth to come out at some point for my family," he said.
Adjusting to life outside prison hasn't been an easy feat for Robert, who hadn't seen the outside world since the early 1980s. Revealing the most difficult adjustment, he wrote: "The phone. Before I went in, if you wanted to go somewhere you used paper maps. No google maps or a cell phone.
"Not to mention things you can look up on the internet now that you would have had to drive, who knows how many miles to find what you were looking for. A part, a piece of furniture, you can browse without going anywhere. ... I stayed up all night with the phone the first few nights. At first I couldn't answer it when my lawyer Susan called me. I was tapping it, because I didn't know how to slide it. It was overwhelming at first. I'd seen cell phones in prison, that people would get once in a while, but I would never use them."
Florida has a law that pays exonerees $50,000 per year they were in prison but the state has a "clean hands" rule alongside that rule. Because Robert had a theft conviction for stealing tools and siphoning gas from a car as a juvenile, the state said he was ineligible for the compensation.
Robert lobbied the state legislature to pass a bill to pay him the money, $1.85 million, and they passed it. He then sued the city of Tampa, police officers who investigated the case and a forensic dentist who had testified that his teeth matched the purported bite mark on the victim.
In February, the Tampa City Council voted unanimously to approve it and officially award Robert $14 million. But he claims he'll only see about half that money and that no amount of money could make up for all that he's lost.
"I'm not getting $14 million, I'm only going to get roughly half of that after legal costs and attorneys and everything. Money doesn't restore anything," he said. In March Abron Scott pleaded guilty to murdering Barbara as well as another Tampa woman, Linda Lansen.
Amos Robinson is awaiting trial. Both men remain persons of interest in at least three other unsolved cases in Tampa Bay.
