A Proclamation of Innocence for a Prisoner Who Never Gave Up

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Sometimes it turns out that people do tell the truth about themselves. Sorry if that qualifying “sometimes” sounds cynical. But when you meet someone in prison who says she did not commit the murder that earned her a sentence of 25 years to life, you have reason to take her claims with a shaker of salt.

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Only now it looks as if Cathy Watkins was being straight and she was innocent of that murder, after all.

Ms. Watkins and four men were convicted of having killed a livery cabdriver named Baithe Diop in January 1995, an era when driving a cab in this city was all too often a life-ending proposition. In 1994, 25 drivers were killed. The year before, the death toll was 42. Taxi murders occurred so frequently back then that Mr. Diop's death drew only a one-line mention in this newspaper - and that was in a brief article about another driver shot to death two days later.

Ms. Watkins, said to have lured Mr. Diop to his death, was found guilty of second-degree murder in October 1997. She was 29. There was every reason to assume she would spend most of her life, if not all of it, at Bedford Hills, the maximum-security state prison for women in Westchester County.

But now comes word that federal investigators are convinced that Ms. Watkins and the four others were innocent. As described on Friday by my New York Times colleagues Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum, “new findings suggest that there was a colossal breakdown in the criminal justice system.”

This does not mean that the cell doors are about to spring open any minute for Ms. Watkins. As a first step, the Bronx district attorney, whose office was in charge of the Diop case, has to say if he accepts the new federal findi ngs. Readily admitting mistakes is not a hallmark of most prosecutors.

Yet it does seem that Ms. Watkins, now 44, was truthful when she said to me that she had nothing to do with Mr. Diop's death.

That was in 2009. I had gone to Bedford Hills to observe commencement ceremonies for inmates receiving degrees through a program run by Marymount Manhattan College in collaboration with several other schools. It had taken Ms. Watkins 11 years - not an unusual amount of time in prison, where only a few courses may be taken each semester - but she was finally getting her bachelor's degree in sociology. She had done so well that she was named the valedictorian.

We did not talk extensively about the crime beyond her insistence that she was not guilty. But she added poignantly in an interview, “Innocent or guilty, you can still grow to be a better person.”

The Marymount program at the prison is run by Aileen Baumgartner, who said her focus was not so much on preparing inmates for future lives on the outside but, rather, on expanding their horizons while confined. “I'm here for the ones who won't get out,” she said, “because they still have minds and spirit, and can grow.”

Over the weekend, Ms. Baumgartner was intrigued to hear about the latest findings in the Diop case. Despite a widely held notion that all prisoners protest their innocence, “most of them admit their guilt,” she said. Not Ms. Watkins. Not ever.

“She claimed she was innocent straight down the line,” Ms. Baumgartner said in a telephone interview. “She actually did her senior thesis on wrongful conviction.”

“She was angry for a while, very angry,” she continued. “But it didn't stop her from working hard and getting her degree. She didn't have a large chip on her shoulder. She's not needy. Many of the women there are. I never thought she was asking for belief, or that she was drumming up support for her cause, even though we were well aware that she picked her topics because she knew she was innocent. It was a subject close to her.”

These days, Ms. Baumgartner said, Ms. Watkins “does the housekeeping for the school - making sure we have our supplies.”

Now, who knows what awaits her?

At the commencement ceremony, Ms. Watkins sounded like someone not about give up. “Even though these walls can restrict our physical movement,” she told her fellow inmates, who responded with huge cheers, “they cannot restrict our imagination, nor our connection to the outside world.”