In 1998, Joyce Watkins and her boyfriend, Charlie Dunn, were wrongfully convicted of the murder of her four-year-old great-niece, Brandi.
Both were handed life sentences in a Tennessee prison, but in December 2021 Watkins and Dunn – who died in 2015 – were exonerated.
Watkins, now 74, has now spoken about her conviction and detailed how ‘awful’ it was to see all she’d worked for simply ‘go down the drain’.
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Watkins sat down for an interview with CBS this month, and when asked what she’d lost as a result of her wrongful conviction, she told correspondent Erin Moriarty: “I lost my family, my friends, everything I’d worked for.”
Watkins went on: “My good paying job, all of my savings. [The] nice clothes that I had. The diamonds, pearls. I lost all of it. And I worked so hard to get it.”
Asked directly about her family, Watkins added: “I lost four brothers. A sister. I had 13 aunts and uncles, I only have one left. She’s 96. I lost a lot of cousins, nieces, nephews.
“When I lost my four brothers and sisters I knew I had lost everything. But I have two sisters left.”
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Just over halfway through the interview, Moriarty said to Watkins: “You’ve got your freedom back, but the state can’t give you back what you lost for being wrongfully convicted.”
Watkins agreed: “They can’t give me those years back.”
It was then revealed that in 1997, a year before Watkins’ conviction, she had been thinking about adopting.
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Watkins responded: “Yes I was. All of my sisters and brothers have kids but me. I wanted to add one more to the family. I was probably about a month [away from having a child come and stay with me].”
She went on: “I was very excited. I had bought furniture, fixed the room up. I had three bedrooms upstairs, a bathroom, living, dining room, a kitchen downstairs.
“You know, I just wanted a little kid to run through the house like my nieces and nephews. But I lost all of it.”
Watkins was told by a district attorney in a Tennessee courtroom last year that she had finally been found innocent.
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Davidson County District Attorney General Glenn Funk told her: "I want to say to both Ms. Watkins, and to the family of Charlie Dunn, that I believe they were actually innocent."
After the death of Dunn in 2015, Watkins was granted parole and released from prison after spending 27 years behind bars.
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Topics: Crime
Aisha Nozari