Randall Dale Adams (December 17, 1948 – October 30, 2010) was an American man wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death after the 1976 shooting of Dallas police officer Robert W. Wood. His conviction was overturned in 1989. Throughout his legal ordeal, Adams maintained his innocence. He insisted that the man he believed to be Wood's killer, David Ray Harris, had offered him a ride on the day of the shooting after his own car had run out of gasoline. Adams and Harris had spent several hours together but had parted ways prior to the shooting. Under an immunity agreement, Harris testified for the prosecution that Adams was the shooter of Officer Wood while he was the passenger. Based on the testimony of Harris and other alleged eyewitnesses, Adams was found guilty by a Dallas County jury and imprisoned on death row. In 1980, his sentence was commuted to life in prison. While incarcerated for the crime, Adams was the subject of the 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line, which was cited as being instrumental in his exoneration the following year. Writer-director Errol Morris knew that Harris had, on multiple occasions, bragged about shooting a police officer. He later uncovered evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and eyewitness misidentification. During an interview with Harris, Morris was able to record audio of him giving a pseudo-confession to the Wood murder. In 2004, Harris was executed by lethal injection for an unrelated 1985 murder. He was never charged with Robert Wood's murder. Six months after the film's release, Adams's conviction was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and prosecutors declined to retry the case. Adams received no compensation from the State of Texas for the 12 years he spent in prison. He died of a brain tumor in 2010. Early life and education Adams was born in Grove City, Ohio, the youngest of five children of a woman named Mildred and a miner who died of coalworker's pneumoconiosis. Adams graduated from high school in 1967, and spent three years as a U.S. Army paratrooper. Murder conviction In October 1976, 27-year-old Randall Adams and his brother left Ohio for California. En route, they arrived in Dallas on Thanksgiving night. The next morning, Adams was offered a contracting job. On the following Saturday, November 27, Adams went to start work but no one turned up because it was a weekend. On the