By Linh Nguyen
LOS ANGELES– Los Angeles County man Quintin Morris, who was sentenced to three life sentences plus 12 years for three counts of attempted first-degree murder in 1994, was granted clemency 27 years after his wrongful conviction.
Shortly after midnight on Nov. 30, 1991, two people in a white Cadillac confronted a group of four teenagers for cutting them off. The driver, Claude Davis, remained in the car while Howard Holt, dressed in black with a mask that covered his face and neck, exited the vehicle and opened fire on the teenagers from about 30 feet away. Davis and Holt then sped away. Less than two blocks away, Quintin Morris and his friend Harlan Morgan were waiting at a red light in a yellow Cadillac. The two were on their way to buy alcohol for a party they were attending. The police discovered them five minutes after the shooting in the car that only differed from the getaway car by color, and Morris and Morgan were detained.
Morris and Morgan cooperated with the police and allowed them to search the yellow Cadillac. The police did not find guns, bullets or masks. The police believed the suspects could have thrown the items from the car, so they searched the surrounding neighborhood but still did not find guns, bullets or masks.
Despite the lack of physical evidence connecting Morris and Morgan to the crime and the fact that witnesses saw a white Cadillac speeding from the crime scene, the police arrested them because of the yellow Cadillac.
The police conducted an identification procedure and brought in two of the victims. One identified Morris as the shooter. However, the identification was faulty because Morris was the driver of his vehicle, not the passenger. Furthermore, Morris was wearing a waist-length jacket, not a knee-length one. The witness’s confidence with her identification increased over time. At the trial, she claimed 
she could see the shooter through the mask even though it covered his facial features.
Based on this evidence, the jury convicted Morris of three counts of attempted first-degree murder. He received three life sentences plus 12 years.
Judge Michael Hoff, the trial judge presiding over this case, was concerned about the conviction, expressing “grave concerns about the sufficiency of the evidence” against Morris.
Judge Hoff even tried to convince the district attorney to drop the charges for this reason.
After Morris was convicted, his appellate attorney discovered that the true culprit was Howard Holt. Holt had also been convicted of similar shootings around the same timeframe. The white Cadillac of interest was also traced back to be in Holt’s possession. Holt later confessed to the appellate attorney and to Judge Hoff. Judge Hoff reversed Morris’s conviction after hearing the confession, noting that Morris’s innocence was clear.
However, the Los Angeles County District Attorney appealed the exoneration and won on appeal. The Court of Appeal found that Holt’s confession should have been presented at Morris’s trial, making it inadmissible to the trial judge after conviction. The Court of Appeal also believed that the eyewitness identification in the original trial was strong.
On federal review, a federal judge said that he could not reverse Morris’s conviction because there were no “legal avenues to do so.” The judge also showed concern about whether Morris actually committed the crime. He suggested that Morris apply for a pardon from the governor of California.
Morris’s case was pursued by the California Innocence Project, which conducted an investigation into Morris’s claim of innocence. They found the getaway driver of the crime, Claude Davis, and found the identifying victim, who said she had doubts about her identification of Morris.
In 2013, the California Innocence Project petitioned for clemency to Morris to Governor Jerry Brown. Five years later, Governor Brown granted him clemency and made him immediately eligible for parole. Fifty-three-year-old Quintin Morris was released on Jan. 10, 2019, on parole, after serving 27 years in prison.
According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office of Annual Costs per California incarceree, the cost of Morris’s wrongful conviction amounted to over $2 million.
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