Tonight Saturday (April 29 2023) “48 Hours” After a night out, two women were dumped outside hospitals by masked men
The April 29 edition of “48 Hours” airs at 10PM ET/PT on CBS. You can watch previous episodes at CBS and ParamountPlus. Lamar Johnson was 21 in 1995 when he was charged with the murder of a friend, Markus Boyd. Johnson said he was miles away with his girlfriend and daughter, but he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison primarily based on the testimony of Greg Elking, who picked Johnson out of a police lineup. Nearly three decades later, Johnson’s conviction was vacated after Elking recanted his identification of Johnson. Now, Johnson tells the story of his fight to prove his innocence and Elking explains why he lied at Johnson’s trial to 48 HOURS correspondent Erin Moriarty. The broadcast “Lamar Johnson: Standing in Truth”
“You feel like you’re in a hole or a sewer, and you’re looking up and you’re … calling out for help from people, and people are walking by because they don’t hear you,” Johnson tells Moriarty about his time in prison.
Years later, while working on Johnson’s case, The Midwest Innocence Project discovered that Elking had recanted his trial testimony in a letter to a clergyman. Yet, the case continued to stall until 2018, when the St. Louis circuit attorney’s office – led by Kimberly Gardner – agreed to review the conviction. A year later, her team released a detailed report listing numerous errors that undermined Lamar Johnson’s conviction. Following a change in Missouri law, in December 2022, a judge heard his case at an innocence hearing and two months later Johnson was exonerated.
Did it occur to Greg Elking that he might have put an innocent man behind bars?
“Yes, without a doubt,” he tells Moriarty. “I lied because I thought I was doing the right thing.”
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