A former Mid-Missouri man who was locked up for nearly 10 years before his convictions in a 2001 slaying were vacated will star in a new documentary series set to debut on MTV in mid-August.
Ryan Ferguson and co-investigator Eva Nagao earlier this year examined three cases in which they believe the defendants were wrongfully convicted. The first episode of "Unlocking the Truth," which documents their efforts to reinvestigate the cases, is scheduled to premiere Aug. 17.
Ryan Ferguson
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Ferguson's father, Bill, said the idea for the show first came to Ryan Ferguson while he still was in prison for the 2001 killing of Kent Heitholt, the Tribune's sports editor. Bill and Ryan continued to talk about the idea for the show until January, more than two years after Ryan Ferguson's November 2013 release, when they met with people at MTV, who liked the idea. Production began in the spring, with Ryan Ferguson and Nagao and the crew spending about 15 weeks investigating the cases and producing the show.
They began looking at 10 cases early in the year and later settled on three: two out of Missouri and one in North Carolina, Bill Ferguson said.
"It was a lot of work investigating because we don't want to be in a position investigating somebody who's obviously guilty," Bill Ferguson said. Ryan Ferguson, who now lives in Florida, was not available for an interview for this story.
Heitholt's murder went unsolved for more than two years before Charles Erickson, a high school friend of Ryan Ferguson's, began telling people he'd had dream-like memories that the pair killed the editor. Columbia police picked up Erickson, who confessed and implicated Ferguson. Erickson pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and armed criminal action and still is in prison. Ferguson was convicted of murder, robbery and armed criminal action and sentenced to 40 years in prison before an appeals court vacated his convictions in November 2013 and he was released.
Erickson has said for years that he lied on the stand during Ryan Ferguson's trial because of pressure from the prosecution. Ryan Ferguson has never wavered from his claims of innocence and has accused police of misconduct in his case.
Ryan Ferguson has a federal civil rights lawsuit pending against six officers involved in the investigation.
Bill Ferguson said the goal of the show is to highlight how anyone can be wrongfully convicted of a crime in the United States.
"There are so many people that have been innocently put in prison, and most of them don't have the money, the resources or the support to resurrect them from the prison system," Bill Ferguson said. "Hopefully this will open the eyes of the public that this happens."
Gloria Browne-Marshall, a former civil rights attorney and associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said wrongful convictions have long been a problem in the American criminal justice system. Most occur because of faulty eyewitness testimony, quality of the defense, racial or class bias on the part of the state or witnesses or misconduct by police or prosecutors. Reversing convictions is a massive burden, she said.
"At the end of the day, unless you have advocates to ferret through all that information ... you have people who can sit behind bars for all of their lives and on death row," Browne-Marshall said.
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Source: Ryan Ferguson to co-star in MTV series investigating convictions
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