JUAN ROBERTO MELENDEZ
Convicted by the Lies of a Heroine Addict Who Earned Five Grand for his Testimony

 “When I speak at conferences, and law colleges, and churches, I urge people to write to law makers and tell them to pass legislation to hold prosecutors and law investigators accountable who proceed with a death penalty case when they know they have an innocent man on their hands. The Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors and law officers have total immunity when prosecuting a case. It gives them a license to kill without consequence.

When the prosecution and investigators were spending all this time and energy and money trying to kill me, when I did not do the crime and they knew it, how about the real killer? What do they think he was doing?”—Juan Roberto Melendez, who served 17 years, 8 months, and one day on death row before being exonerated.1

The Crime
September 13, 1983, Auburndale, Florida
Delbart Baker owned and managed two cosmetology schools, in Polk County, Florida—one in the city of Auburndale and the other in Lakeland.2 Located on the periphery of a predominantly African-American neighborhood, most of the employees and students at the Auburndale school were black, as well as most of the customers who availed themselves of the business’s hair styling services. Delbart Baker was Caucasian, but the neighborhood residents generally held him in high regard for bringing jobs and skills training to an economically depressed part of town. They called him ‘Mr. Del.’

On the evening of September 13, 1983, shortly before 6:00 pm, Terry Barber—a frequent costumer and friend of Mr. Del’s—stopped by the Auburndale shop to chat. It was after hours, but Mr. Del answered when Terry Barber knocked on the door. From the front of the shop he could see into the backroom. Mr. Del had company. Terry Barber cut his visit short.

It was no secret to most of the neighborhood crowd that Delbart Baker was a homosexual. Baker, 57, fancied sexual encounters with young black men and had a reputation for hosting after-hours parties where the illegal drugs flowed freely.

On that evening, Baker’s housemate (and business partner) Ed McDonald had expected him home by 7:00, at the latest. Baker had said he might stop by Sears to check on some draperies. By 7:30, Ed McDonald was becoming worried. He called both businesses, and getting no answer, phoned Baker’s sister and brother. Both resided in Lakeland, but neither one of them had seen their brother that day. The stormy weather roused concerns that Baker may have had an accident, but nothing had been reported. At McDonald’s urging, Delbart Baker’s sister phoned the police and asked them to send an officer to see if her brother’s car was at the Auburndale business.

Law enforcement officials arrived at the beauty school at 9:29. Inside, they found the body of Delbart Baker on the floor, awash in a sea of blood, with his throat slashed and three gunshot wounds to the head and shoulders. He wore only socks and white jockey shorts. The medical examiner estimated Baker’s time of death at 7:30 pm. A stray bullet had ricocheted off the refrigerator, and the walls and ceiling were splattered with blood, suggesting that there may have been a struggle, and that Baker had resisted his attackers. A spent .38 caliber cartridge was recovered from the scene. Baker’s diamond rings, gold bracelet, watch, and the gold neck chain he always wore were missing, as well as the petty cash, which Baker kept in his desk drawer, but the day’s cash receipts were still in his briefcase.

When Terry Barber heard what had happened to Mr. Del, he went to the police. Terry Barber identified the men he saw in the backroom of Mr. Del’s shop earlier that evening as Vernon James and Harold ‘Bobo’ Landrum, neighborhood residents, both in their twenties. Both men had a history of prior arrests for minor offenses, as well as felony convictions—James for burglary and Landrum for armed robbery. Landrum’s rap sheet also included solicitation to prostitute and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

On the morning of September 14, Auburndale police took James and Landrum into custody for questioning. The tread pattern on Landrum’s sneakers matched bloody footprints at the crime scene, but both James and Landrum denied having anything to do with Delbart Baker’s murder. Landrum claimed he was at his job at Morrison’s Cafeteria. After talking with Landrum’s employer, who evidently vouched for his whereabouts (police records are vague on this point), Landrum was dropped as a suspect. As for Vernon James, word on the street was that he was a police informer who worked closely with Auburndale Police Detective John Knapp, the chief investigator assigned to the Delbart Baker murder case. Although the extent of James’s relationship with Detective Knapp is not known, earlier police reports verify that Vernon James had given law enforcement officials information in the past. Vernon James clothes were initially seized by police, but returned to him without being tested for possible blood traces or other evidence. Vernon James was dropped as a suspect as well. An official police report on the Delbart Baker murder was never filed until six months later, in March of 1984.

The Trail of Lies That Led to Juan Melendez

Juan Melendez was born in 1951, in Brooklyn, New York. His father was killed in a bar fight before Juan was born. He remembers the super of the apartment building where he lived with his mother as her boyfriend, but Juan never regarded the man as a father figure—“He would beat my mama. One time she came running into the bedroom battered and bleeding, screaming that I must come with her, we must run away. I told her to hide behind a mattress leaning against the wall. The man came charging into the room with a baseball bat. ‘Where is she?’ he asked me. I pointed to the door, saying she was gone. He would have killed her.”

When Juan was six, he and his younger half brother and mother left New York for Puerto Rico, the country of her birth. She had come to the U.S. with the help of her aunt, to find work and a better life, but it was not the dream she had hoped for. Juan flew fare free sitting in the lap of his great aunt and godmother, while his younger half brother rode in his mother’s lap.
The family lived in the agrarian community of Maunabo. There was no lack of love in the home, but money was in short supply. Juan went to school barefoot. At the age of fourteen, at the end of the ninth grade, he left school and began working in the fields cutting sugar cane.

In April of 1970, just a month before his nineteenth birthday, Juan returned to the U.S. to work on a farm in Magnolia, Delaware picking vegetables. When cold weather set in, he followed the work south and picked fruit in the Florida citrus groves.3 Juan liked Florida. The abundance of sun and balmy climate reminded him of home...4