Free Daryl Walker

The headline over the lead story in the Aug. 19 Weekender edition asked a question. "Is this justice?" The article detailed assertions made by Daryl Walker, 47, formerly of Fremont. Walker has been a state prison inmate since 1996, for crimes he allegedly committed as a teenager, crimes investigated by a detective who years later was found to have falsified information in a homicide case. The now ex-detective spent two years in a state prison after getting convicted in 2018, when it was shown he manufactured evidence against three young Black people in an effort to frame them for the 2015 murder of Heather Bogle. Walker was born Black, and he's remained Black every day of the 10,000 days he's already spent behind bars. Nobody else involved in the fight that landed him in prison is still incarcerated. They all were freed years ago. And nobody gets sent to prison for that long on a questionable domestic violence charge. Or at least we hope there aren't other inmates who suffered the same fate Walker suffered, at the hands of a dishonest detective. A friend of Walker's contacted the Register and shared statements Walker made to her about how the former detective stalked him in the early 1990s, harassed him and threatened to send him to jail, statements that remarkably mirror what others have said about how the detective conducted his business. There is a pattern. The Register's reporting has been stymied by the many years since Walker was convicted. Court records are not yet available. Records from the last parole hearing are scant. We were denied the opportunity to talk directly with Walker. But the newspaper's reporting about the ex-detective is abundant, thorough and spans years. The police reports the detective wrote about Walker look similar to other police reports he wrote for other investigations, in which he provided contradictory information and made questionable assertions that were hotly refuted by the victims of crimes. Is this justice? No, it most assuredly is not. For Daryl Walker the question means everything. He's losing hope he'll ever be freed. "Every time I have gotten my hopes up I was let down," Walker wrote to his friend. "It's like I'm drained of all my fight ... It isn't fair. How did I reap this torture?" We call on prison officials, the Fremont police, the Sandusky County sheriff's office, the county prosecutor, the administrative judge and the state Supreme Court to immediately review the circumstances of Walker's convictions and his incarceration and start steps to free him. We call on officials to review every felony criminal case for every state prison inmate still incarcerated in which the former detective was a witness for the prosecution.