Javon Davis

In March 2020, Javon Davis left prison 22 years early after serving six years for a crime he didn’t commit.

A shooting by masked men

In April 2014, in the middle of the night, three masked men shot Kibbie Walker and Cortez Blakemore after they ended their work shift in Minneapolis near Target Field.  Blakemore was paralyzed from the shooting. Walker was wounded in the chest.

The masked men wore hoods tightly pulled around their faces.  Though there were several witnesses, none could identify the shooters because so little of their faces could be seen.  

The police believed the shooting was gang-related and suspected that Javon Davis was one of the shooters because Walker was rumored to have previously killed one of Javon’s close friends. This hunch by the police, despite no physical evidence affirming the suspicion, would color the entire investigation.  

Like all of the other witnesses, Walker told the police he could not see the shooter. However, the police continued to question Walker and falsely told him that they had surveillance video showing that Javon was the shooter. After hours of questioning, Walker eventually told police that he thought Javon was the shooter.

However, Javon had extensive evidence to prove he was nowhere near the shooting. He was with friends in a different town visiting a club and a restaurant, and there were multiple people willing to testify about his location. His cell phone records showed that he was talking on the phone to his girlfriend at the time of the shooting, and that he was located 20 minutes away when the shooting occurred.

Javon turned down a plea offer before the trial, confident the evidence would show he was innocent. 

Poor defense

Despite the evidence showing he was not near the shooting and the lack of any physical evidence tying him to the scene, police charged Javon. He was brought to trial in 2015.  

His defense lawyer would later be barred from practicing law in Minnesota after a 2024 investigation by the Minnesota Supreme Court found an extensive pattern of misconduct.

During Javon’s trial, his attorney made several poor decisions.  

Walker recanted on the stand, maintaining he couldn’t identify his shooter and didn’t want to be responsible for sending an innocent man to prison. However, after Walker’s recantation, the prosecution showed a video the police had filmed of Walker identifying Javon as the shooter, a statement he made after the police questioned him for hours and lied to him about the video evidence. Javon’s attorney let the video be shown to the jury without objecting to any of its contents, despite Walker’s recantation. 

After the video was shown to the jury, the trial judge stopped the trial and pulled both attorneys aside, telling them that the video contained “all kinds of things, like leading questions, speculation, conclusions, hearsay…but nothing was objected to so there was nothing for me to rule on.…OK?”

Though Javon’s attorney continually encouraged Javon to be “positive,” Javon had a strong feeling the jury was going to find him guilty as he watched the trial unfold.

His fears were confirmed when the jury found him guilty of two counts of attempted murder and he was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Proving his innocence

After the conviction, Javon immediately started working to prove his innocence, filing several appeals, including one with an appellate attorney, as well as a pro se motion (a motion submitted by an individual representing himself or herself), but they were all denied.

“At the end of the letter, I remember writing, if anybody is ‘innocent project innocent,’ I am ‘innocent project innocent.'”

— Javon Davis, on what he wrote in his first letter to the Innocence Project of Minnesota

Javon steadfastly maintained his innocence and then reached out to GNIP in 2018. When visited by University of Minnesota law students screening the case, he told them he was, “innocence project innocent.”

In November 2018, GNIP attorneys filed a new motion for post-conviction relief, stating that Javon was convicted because he had ineffective counsel at his trial, and that his appellate attorney was ineffective in failing to raise this issue on appeal.  

GNIP’s motion explained that Javon’s original lawyer should have objected to the introduction of Walker’s video statement, and also pointed out that the attorney had never introduced Javon’s cell phone records into evidence, which made them unavailable for the jury to view during their deliberations.

In March 2020, a judge vacated Javon’s conviction and ordered a new trial. He wrote a 141-page order that was very critical of Javon’s attorney’s ineffective counsel, writing that it “infected the entire trial, allowing the State to present what proved to be a ‘thin’ case against Javon based largely on inadmissible but damaging evidence.”

Two weeks later, the prosecution dismissed all charges “in the interests of justice.” Javon left prison the same day and reunited with his family, including his six children.

Javon described his whole unit, including the corrections officers, celebrating his victory.  One of the corrections officers even came in on his day off, saying, “I worked today just to see you leave.”

Javon expressed his gratitude for the work of GNIP, saying, “they believed in me. They came and visited me. We talked. They looked me in my eyes. We were 100% true with each other and they believed me. It’s hard to get people to believe in you, especially in the criminal justice world or whatever we go through.  It’s really hard to get people to believe you. Like, I didn’t do this. No matter what you think about me or who you think I am, I’m not that person. And I did not do this.”

“I’m ecstatic and so thankful,” Javon said. “I am so happy they believed in me. They saved my life.”

In 2024, the State of Minnesota said that Javon will be entitled to compensation for the time he was wrongfully incarcerated. 

Javon’s story is featured on the National Registry of Exonerations.

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