On December 17, Myon Burrell stood on a stage inside Sabathani Community Center in South Minneapolis. Before him, a few dozen people sat in groups of two or three, their seats separated by blue masking tape to maintain social distancing.
The people were there to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Burrell’s release from prison.
“It’s so easy for us to turn a blind eye to injustice if it’s not impacting us directly.”
In 2002, Burrell was sixteen years old and living in Bemidji, a small city in northern Minnesota. His mother had moved the family there from Minneapolis when Burrell was twelve. She was afraid he would end up in jail like so many other young Black men—including his father and brother—if they stayed in the city.
But moving up north was not enough to keep Burrell away from trouble. In 2002, Burrell and his family returned to Minneapolis to visit his grandmother for Thanksgiving. Over that weekend, Tyesha Edwards, an eleven-year-old girl, was struck by a stray bullet and killed in her South Minneapolis home.
Burrell took the fall for the crime after being named as the shooter by a former rival who happened to be a police informant, according to articles written about his case. He was subsequently sentenced as an adult to fifty years in prison, with the prosecution handled by then-Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar.
Few people outside of Minnesota knew Burrell’s story until Klobuchar sought the Democratic Party’s nomination for President in 2020. Her candidacy brought fresh scrutiny, especially after she cited her conviction of Burrell as evidence of her record as a tough-on-crime prosecutor.
In January 2020, Associated Press reporter Robin McDowell published an article, with support from APM Reports, the investigative news unit from American Public Media, documenting the many holes in the prosecution that Klobuchar had held up as an example of her best work.
McDowell’s investigation revealed that there was in fact no evidence tying Burrell to the murder of Tyesha Edwards. It also showed that another prisoner had confessed to firing the gun that tragically ended Tyesha’s young life but that nobody within the criminal justice system paid attention or advocated on Burrell’s behalf. He spent more than half of his life behind bars at Minnesota’s Stillwater Correctional Facility, missing his mother’s funeral and his son’s earliest years, along with many other key life events.
Burrell’s experience is not unique. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992, ten years before Burrell was wrongfully convicted of murder. It uses DNA evidence on behalf of people like Burrell, to show they have been mistakenly imprisoned.
The group’s website offers some startling statistics, including the average number of years people spend in prison before being exonerated (sixteen), as well as the staggering demand for the Innocence Project’s services. Since 1993, the organization has received more than 65,000 letters asking for help.
In Burrell’s case, it was McDowell’s dogged investigative work, conducted and published amid the spotlight provided by the 2020 Presidential election, that led to his release from prison on December 15, 2020. He was released based on a parole board’s decision, however, and not because his conviction has been overturned.
This means that Burrell’s fight for justice is not over. At the celebration held to mark his first year of post-prison life, Twin Cities racial and criminal justice activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who was instrumental in helping to get Burell released, referred to him as a “symbol of hope.”
“He’s shy,” Levy Armstrong told the small crowd gathered on Burrell’s behalf, before prompting him to step up to the microphone and share a little bit of his story.
Burrell spoke quietly, thanking the people who helped fight for his release and insisting that, if it weren’t for them, he’d likely still be in prison.
“It’s so easy for us to turn a blind eye to injustice if it’s not impacting us directly,” he noted. But, he continued, we are here to “make sure what happened to [me] does not happen to anyone else’s child.”
Nearly everyone present highlighted how solidarity and collaboration made Burrell’s release from prison possible. McDowell’s article provided the fuel to reignite his fight for justice and the Minneapolis NAACP, under the leadership of Julia Redmond, made sure that questions about Burrell’s case were front and center at every press conference Klobuchar held on her campaign trail.
It worked. Burrell is out of prison and free to try to put together a new life for himself.
Meanwhile, an estimated 20,000 wrongfully convicted people—most of them Black men—remain behind bars, waiting for someone or something to turn the wheels of justice in their favor.