So great was the distance Randall Dale Adams had retreated from being a public figure that his death last October in his home state of Ohio was reported nationally just last week.

Yet the obscurity he sought and found in the last years of his life cannot be granted him in death. He was too important a figure to be forgotten; his story could just as easily been anyone's story, and that's why he must be remembered.

Adams was convicted, sentenced to die by lethal injection and spent more than 12 years in prison in Texas for a murder he didn't commit: the 1976 shooting of a Dallas police officer. He was the subject of Errol Morris' 1988 documentary, A Thin Blue Line In fact, it was Morris, during the making of the film, who uncovered much of the evidence clearing Adams.

The teenager, David Ray Harris, who actually killed the officer, accused Adams. Harris' testimony was corroborated by other witnesses. In May of 1979, three days before Adams was to be executed, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a stay because of jury selection issues.

Gov. Bill Clements commuted Adams' sentence to life in prison. In 1989, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Adams' conviction because of malfeasance by the prosecutor who'd withheld exculpatory evidence and lied about it. All charges were dropped.

What's often forgotten about The Thin Blue Line is that Morris' initial reason for doing the documentary was to profile a Dallas psychiatrist whose testimony was used by the Dallas district attorney's office to get a death sentence with alarming regularity. The psychiatrist testified that if Adams was released, he'd kill again.

Adams was the first high-profile case to illustrate that while Texas leads the nation in executions, it's also had its share of wrongly accused and convicted men sentenced to death who were later found innocent.

While there's considerable doubt that Cameron Todd Willingham was guilty of setting the fire that killed his three daughters and led to his 2004 execution, there's no doubt that men such as Clarence Brandley and Anthony Graves were innocent. But before them, there was Adams.

"Randall's case thrust national exposure on the issue of innocence among death row prisoners," says Dr. Roger Barnes, a sociology professor at University of the Incarnate Word and an anti-death-penalty activist. "His case demonstrated how it's possible to give a death sentence to the wrong person. In some sense Randall was fortunate - Texas didn't kill him. Cameron Todd Willingham wasn't as lucky."

Texas Monthly staff writer Pamela Colloff wrote a piece on Adams in 2001, and her story last year on Graves was instrumental in his being released and having the charges dropped. She also cites Adams' importance.

"Before people had ever heard of Anthony Graves, Clarence Brandley or Kerry Max Cook, there was Randall Dale Adams," she says. "Today, in large part because of the recent DNA exonerations, I think most people accept the idea that an innocent person can actually be convicted. But Adams' case came along before that shift in public thinking, when it was difficult for most people to believe that the state could make that egregious of an error, not only convicting an innocent man but sentencing him to death. Adams' story helped show people that this was actually possible. His case prefigured DNA exonerations and the Innocence Project."

Colloff also points out that unlike those exonerated today who can receive compensation, Adams didn't get anything. His attorney told the New York Times that Adams didn't even qualify for the $200 given to prisoners when they are released upon completion of their sentence or parole.

For a time, Adams became an anti-death-penalty activist. When he was fired from a job in Texas after his boss did a background check, he moved back to Ohio.

It's where he lived quietly, and it's where he quietly died; an innocent man who never got back what was taken from him.

