Andre Davis Released From Prison After A Wrongful Conviction Is Charged With Murder Again

• Clayton Hauck
• Andre Davis, 32 years after he was convicted of rape and murder

Two years ago, Andre Davis was released from prison after DNA evidence pointed to another man in the 1980 rape and murder of three-year-old Brianna Stickel. Of the 100-plus inmates wrongfully convicted in Illinois, Davis had spent more time than any of them behind bars: 32 years.

However, Davis’s mother said that in the months after my visit she saw more of her son’s anger emerge. The relationship between mother and son had been strong throughout the decades of his incarceration, but it became strained once he was free. “He’s disrespecting me in a way he never did in all those years in prison,” Emma Davis told me last year. “My son is a changed man.”

• Courtesy Judi Stickel
• Andre Davis with Jane Raley, the Center on Wrongful Convictions attorney who worked to free him