09/01/2011
By Kathleen Hopkins
Byron Halsey spent 22 years behind bars in New Jersey, convicted of heinous crimes he didn’t commit — the horrific murders of his live-in girlfriend’s two young children and a sexual assault on one of the children in their Plainfield rooming house.
After a repairman found the children — Tina Urquhart, 7, sexually assaulted and strangled and her brother, Tyrone, 8, with nails driven into his skull — in the basement of the rooming house on Nov. 15, 1985, police focused their investigation on Halsey.
With a sixth-grade education and severe learning disabilities, Halsey, then 24, confessed to the crimes after being interrogated for 30 hours, according to the New York–based Innocence Project.
When Halsey gave incorrect information about key facts of the crime during the unrecorded interrogation, police gave him more opportunities to guess the right answer, according to the Innocence Project, which since 1992 has used DNA evidence to secure more than 200 exonerations.
Halsey was sentenced to two life terms plus 20 years in prison after a Union County jury convicted him in 1988 of two counts of felony murder and one count of aggravated sexual assault.
In 2007, after the Innocence Project took his case, and DNA evidence exonerated him and implicated a neighbor in the rooming house, Halsey was released from prison. Clifton Hall, already incarcerated for three separate sex crimes, eventually was charged with the murders of the Urquhart children, but died in prison in 2009 before he could go to trial.
Halsey is one of eight wrongfully convicted people in New Jersey exonerated since 1995 — five of them because of DNA evidence — who is cited by a fledgling program out of Seton Hall University Law School in Newark as proof that innocent people do get convicted of serious crimes they didn’t commit.
The Last Resort Exoneration Project has been operating since February and offers free investigative and legal services. Unlike the Innocence Project, Last Resort takes only New Jersey cases, focusing on those with no DNA evidence.
