Healing After the Cut

Booth Ripke still remembers the smell of the Maryland House of Correction—bodies packed together in the summer heat, with no air conditioning or even open windows to provide relief. That prison—so old, unsafe and infamous that its nickname “The Cut” was frequently mentioned in The Wire—was torn down a few years later. But the smell remained.

“I can’t even put a specific name on it,” says Ripke, whose firm, Nathans & Ripke, periodically takes innocence cases pro bono. “But even today when I open up an envelope or a stack of transcripts [from prison], I can smell it on the paper.”

The Cut was where Ripke met Walter Lomax, during a visitation amid the stacks of cages and the noise. By then, Lomax had been in prison for about 35 years for a crime he didn’t commit.

Lomax’s nightmare began in November 1967. He had been chaperoning his sister at a Thanksgiving Day dance in Baltimore. When he left, he was attacked by a group of kids—stabbed in the right hand, and kicked so hard he had trouble walking for weeks. Nine days later, someone robbed a grocery store at gunpoint, killing the overnight manager in the process. Police chased the perpetrator but he got away. 

Racial tensions were high. The police, Ripke says, started conducting mass lineups of Black suspects in an attempt to quell the angst and identify perpetrators of various robberies and shootings.

Lomax, then 20 years old, showed up at the police station believing there was a warrant out for his arrest. There wasn’t, but police later put him into several lineups anyway. Five white witnesses to the grocery store shooting identified Lomax; another two witnesses, store clerks who directly interacted with the shooter, did not. He was charged with the murder.

Without any evidence besides the eyewitness identifications, Lomax was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Lomax spent years working to appeal his conviction or get a new trial. In the meantime, he built as much of a life as one could inside The Cut. He got his GED and an associate degree, took creative writing courses, published books of poetry, tutored inmates and edited a prison newsletter. For a time, he was even working 40 hours a week at a job outside the prison and doing regular weekend visits to help his father, before those privileges were restricted during the mid-’90s.

Finally, in 2001, Centurion Ministries took an interest in his case. Centurion was the first organization created to help free wrongfully incarcerated people, and unlike most innocence groups, it primarily takes up cases in which DNA is not available to prove the client’s innocence and a re-investigation is necessary. Its founder, Jim McCloskey, was with Ripke when he met Lomax in prison for the first time. Ripke recalls him getting choked up. 

“It doesn’t take much for them to bring me to tears when I’m visiting,” McCloskey says of the innocent people he works with. “Walter is this gentle man, a civilian with great sensitivity and kindness. He moves you.”

“I think that was what was so emotionally moving, even more than the innocence itself,” Ripke recalls. “How can you believe that somebody like this could have committed this crime?”

Centurion retraced the steps of the case and believed in Lomax’s innocence. So they tapped Ripke and his colleague Larry Nathans to work on his behalf.

“In criminal defense work, a lot of times winning is very difficult,” Ripke says. With innocence cases, the stakes are higher: “You feel like you have to win.”

They found two police officers who could testify that Lomax didn’t look like the gunman and another officer who had been outrun by the gunman after the shooting—Lomax could barely walk at the time due to his injuries. None of those officers were called to testify at the original trial. And, crucially, they showed that Lomax’s original defense team failed to show how his hand cast would have prevented him from carrying out the shooting.

“To us it was this physical impossibility,” Ripke says. Lomax’s lawyer never had the jail take photos of his injuries and didn’t offer evidence of the cast, which had been placed on his swollen hand at a Johns Hopkins follow-up visit the day of the robbery.

“[Lomax] knew he was being charged with this crime, but he had no idea how the crime was committed. He wasn’t in a position to know what is exculpatory,” Ripke adds.

They presented their evidence to the prosecutor’s office, which eventually decided not to oppose his release, and Lomax was released in December 2006. During the hearing, the courtroom was packed with family and friends, including the sister whom he’d chaperoned all those years ago.

“Even though it’s my freedom, it’s their moment because they’ve supported me all these years,” Lomax told reporters outside the courthouse.

But his freedom was just the beginning. Lomax hadn’t received any compensation from the state for his time served and he technically still had the murder charge on his record. So Lomax got involved in advocacy for criminal justice reform and started a nonprofit, the Maryland Restorative Justice Initiative.

Years later, under pressure from Lomax and other advocates, Maryland passed laws to allow wrongfully incarcerated people to petition the state for exoneration, rather than the previously required pardon from the governor, and to request payment for their time lost. 

In 2014, Lomax was given $3.4 million. In 2021, a new law went into effect that would make that process easier—and it was named the Walter Lomax Act. Ripke says his firm has since successfully exonerated other innocent people and won compensation for them through the legal changes that Lomax spurred on.

“He is an amazing guy,” Ripke says. “He got out and turned around and tried to help other people in his position.

“It’s a privilege to be a lawyer,” he adds. “We believe it comes with a responsibility, whether it’s written into the law or not, that you need to make sure the system you’re working in is doing the best it can and help out when it makes mistakes.”