He Didn't Kill That Kid: Art Fleak's Fight For Wayne Garrison

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He Didn't Kill That Kid - Synopsis
When a toddler goes missing, hundreds of searchers on foot and horseback comb the back yards and vacant lots of north Tulsa. Finally, a detective realizes that Wayne Henry Garrison, the child he arrested for killing another toddler two years ago, lives across the street. The search ends when he finds the missing toddler’s corpse in the dirt under Wayne’s house.
Wayne, now thirteen, meets his public defender, Art Fleak, fresh out of law school. He was a football hero at an underdog college, could have turned pro, but chose law school so he could keep fighting for underdogs. Fleak is Tulsa County’s first Juvenile Public Defender, dueling with the county’s first District Attorney in the court of the county’s first Juvenile Judge.
Fleak saves Wayne from adult court and a death sentence. Years later, after his release from the state mental hospital, Wayne becomes a juvenile justice success story. With Fleak’s help he finishes high school, then he puts himself through technical school and becomes a husband, father, and small business owner.
The other juvenile offenders in Fleak’s hands have no rights because Oklahoma is the last state in the country without a juvenile justice code. So Fleak writes the code that becomes law. Then he becomes one of America’s first federal public defenders. He wins a federal bank fraud case by bringing in an old football buddy as an expert witness. Wins against the FBI. Becomes a U.S. Supreme Court irritant. Becomes the most winning defense lawyer in federal court, and yet takes time to help a client win against an order forbidding him to have a miniature horse in the city.
When federal investigators arrive quietly in Tulsa to start a secret federal investigation into a blockbuster police corruption scandal, Fleak represents one of the cops’ innocent victims. He leaks the whole top secret story to the media, breaking the case wide open. And even as Fleak’s reputation soars, he still prefers representing the poor, clients who pay him in old cars, vehicles so rusted he spray-paints them in various colors.
After not seeing each other for many more years, the middle-aged Wayne comes back into Fleak’s life, extradited from North Carolina and charged with the grisly, ten-year-old murder of the neighborhood teen whose remains were found scattered around a nearby lake. Fleak’s career is at its peak, but he takes the case knowing Wayne can’t pay.
Psychologists study Wayne his entire life, and finally understand his horribly dysfunctional childhood, sexually assaulted and beaten by his own family, abandoned by his mother. But he’s never diagnosed as mentally ill. He’s an intelligent, talented artist who had lived for years free of any trouble with the law.
If he did it, why don’t prosecutors have a crime scene, a witness, a weapon, a cause of death, or any evidence tying Wayne to the crime? Thousands of pages of the police files were lost. Investigators ignored dozens of leads in their rush to convict Wayne. Fleak unravels the mystery and identifies several better suspects. In a deeply flawed trial, Fleak’s defense is hampered in every way, and he tells reporters, “He didn’t kill that kid.”
Wayne, now serving life without parole, knows that advancements in DNA science might prove his innocence. Still, Tulsa police refuse to let him examine the evidence that may free him, and reveal the true killer.