For 29 years, I went to sleep every night knowing the government had scheduled my death for a crime I did not commit. I entered prison at 24, young and healthy, and left at 60, seriously ill with cancer. In between, I lost my freedom, my family and nearly my life to a wrongful conviction.
In 1985, I was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. My conviction was the result of flaws in our system: inadequate legal representation, a prosecutor who withheld evidence pointing to my innocence and an FBI analyst who gave false testimony at trial.
In 1999, the Innocence Project agreed to take my case. Four years later, DNA testing excluded me as the source of the biological evidence recovered from the crime scene. Yet the state of Florida continued to fight those results. For seven more years, my attorneys battled to have the DNA profile entered into the national DNA database. When the Florida Supreme Court finally ordered the testing in 2010, the results were unmistakable: the DNA matched the victim’s boyfriend. In 2014, the Florida Supreme Court overturned my conviction.
The death penalty is often described as justice. I am living proof that it is not. Now, New Hampshire legislators are trying to bring back executions.
My case is not an outlier. The Innocence Project has represented many people who were wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death, including clients who came within days of execution. These cases share common failures: police and prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective legal representation, eyewitness misidentification, unreliable forensic evidence, coerced false confessions and racial bias. Together, they reveal a capital punishment system that is deeply flawed and that poses an unconscionable risk to innocent people.
Since 1973, at least 200 people in the United States have been exonerated from death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. A 2014 study conservatively estimated that at least four percent of those sentenced to death are innocent. And even those numbers fail to capture the full damage. The threat of execution pressures innocent people to plead guilty and incentivizes false testimony from witnesses, distorting the truth in ways that cannot be undone. Instead of focusing on the death penalty, New Hampshire should do more to prevent and correct wrongful convictions and protect the innocent.
When my conviction was overturned, I walked out of prison a free man. But I never got back the years I spent on death row for a crime I didn’t commit and I never stopped thinking about the men who wouldn’t be as lucky.
Just last week, I traveled from my home state of Florida to New Hampshire to testify before the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee against several bills that would reinstate the death penalty in the Granite State. Supporters of these proposals (House Bills 1749, 1413, 1737, 1730) argue that our justice system is strong and that the risk of condemning an innocent person is exceedingly rare. I am living proof that this confidence is misplaced. One supporter even suggested limiting the amount of time a person can spend on death row to speed up the process. Had that policy existed in my case, I would never have lived long enough to prove my innocence.
New Hampshire executed 26 people in its history before lawmakers voted successfully to abolish the death penalty in 2019. Seven years later, these bills represent a step backward for New Hampshire’s criminal legal system and risk repeating the very failures that lead to wrongful convictions. I urge legislators to not reinstate the death penalty because the fact of the matter is, innocent people are arrested. Innocent people are wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit. And innocent people are sentenced to death. There are innocent people on death row. I know because I was one of them.
Paul Hildwin spent 29 years on Florida’s death row for first-degree murder and was exonerated in 2014 after DNA evidence proved his innocence.