On June 22, 2000, Gary Graham was carried into the death house at the Huntsville Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He was thirty-six years old. He had spent nineteen of those years on death row. And he had never stopped saying he was innocent.
Graham had long since taken another name. On death row he became Shaka Sankofa — joining Shaka, the Zulu king, to sankofa, an Akan word meaning "go back and get it," a philosophy of learning from the past. His birth name was Gary Lee Graham, and it was under that name, in 1981, that a Houston jury convicted him of murder.
The crime at the center of his case was the shooting death of Bobby Grant Lambert, a fifty-three-year-old man killed in Houston on the night of May 13, 1981. That night, Graham went on a crime spree that cut across the city. He later confessed to ten armed robberies, two shootings, and a rape. He did not dispute any of that. But on the specific charge of killing Lambert, he entered a plea of not guilty — and never changed it.