His story.
Nanon Williams has spent more than three decades in Texas prisons for a murder the evidence does not support. This is the record, and the life he built inside it.
Before 1992.
Nanon McKewn Williams was born on August 2, 1974, and grew up in Los Angeles. As a teenager he was an All-American athlete who earned more than seventeen athletic and academic scholarships, and he planned on a future in football.
The case.
On May 14, 1992, a drug deal gone wrong in Houston's Hermann Park left a nineteen-year-old named Adonius Collier dead. Nanon, then seventeen, was charged with the murder. In 1995 he was convicted and sentenced to death.
The case against him rested on two people. The state's firearms examiner, Robert Baldwin, told the jury the fatal bullet was a .25-caliber round, said to be from Nanon's gun. No such gun was ever found. The only weapon recovered was a .22-caliber Derringer belonging to Nanon's associate, Vaal Guevara, and it had never been tested.
Guevara was the only witness who testified that Nanon fired the fatal shot. In exchange for that testimony, he pleaded guilty to a reduced drug charge with a recommended ten-year sentence, and he served less than five years. In 1999, a Harris County prosecutor wrote that at trial Guevara “was very evasive and apparently not at all truthful.”
In 1998, Baldwin wrote to the prosecutor that he had been wrong. The bullet from the victim's head had been fired from the bottom barrel of Guevara's .22 Derringer, a gun that “had not been previously submitted to the laboratory for testing.” In 2024, after a complaint from the University of Colorado Law School's Criminal Defense Clinic, the Texas Forensic Science Commission issued a 157-page report confirming that the ballistics testimony used to convict Nanon was wrong.
Several jurors from the original trial have since said they would have voted differently had they heard accurate ballistics testimony.
What the jury heard, 1995
.25
From a gun that was never found.
What the examiner wrote, 1998
.22.
From the Derringer of the only witness against him.
What Texas confirmed, 2024
The testimony was wrong.
Texas Forensic Science Commission, 157-page report.
Ten years on death row.
Nanon arrived on Texas death row in September 1995, at twenty-one. He spent nearly ten years there and watched more than 450 men executed, under the looming threat of his own execution. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty cannot be imposed for crimes committed before the age of eighteen, and his sentence was commuted to life in prison.
Two judges have sided with him. In 2000, after an evidentiary hearing, a Texas judge recommended relief because Nanon had been denied effective counsel at trial. In 2002, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected that recommendation in an unpublished two-page order. A federal district court later granted relief because his trial lawyers never obtained independent ballistics and pathology experts. In 2012, the Fifth Circuit reversed that ruling, citing the deference federal courts must give state courts.
He remains incarcerated, and becomes eligible for parole in 2027. In the spring of 2019, students in Georgetown University's Making an Exoneree program reinvestigated his case. The program was founded by Marc Howard and Marty Tankleff, childhood friends who know wrongful conviction firsthand: Tankleff spent nearly eighteen years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
A life built inside.
Nanon did not wait on the system. He earned his GED, an associate's degree in Liberal Arts from Trinity Valley Community College, a B.S. in Behavioral Sciences from the University of Houston-Clear Lake, and an M.A. in Humanities, along with numerous trade certifications. A second master's degree, in Literature, is nearly complete.
He has written and published several books and collections of poetry, including his autobiography, Still Surviving. He speaks by phone with high school and college students across the country, and at the Ramsey Unit he has become a peer educator and mental health counselor to other incarcerated men.
He is also a craftsman. In the Ramsey Unit craft shop he makes jewelry and leather goods by hand, work he hopes to carry into a livelihood when he comes home.
Not fighting alone.
Nanon's story has reached people well beyond prison walls. Performer and activist Bryonn Bain has carried it to audiences around the world through Lyrics from Lockdown, which premiered at the National Black Theatre in 2013 with Harry Belafonte and his daughter Gina as executive producers, and has since played Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Theater and Lincoln Center.
Marc Howard, founder of Georgetown University's Prisons and Justice Initiative, saw the show at the Kennedy Center in 2018. He officiated Nanon's wedding to Tera Warner in prison on June 15, 2023.
Rob Reiner joined Lyrics from Lockdown as an executive producer, and he and his wife Michele, with their daughter Romy, became close to Nanon. The Reiners wrote to him often, met regularly with his legal team, and were tireless advocates for his release until Rob and Michele's deaths in December 2025. NBC News told the story of that friendship in a report by Dan Slepian.
I've led a high profile life for over fifty years. And in that time I've met some very impressive and influential people. But if I'm being honest, apart from my father, no one has impressed me more and been more influential to me than Nanon Williams. Each time I talk to him I'm blown away by his intellect and his profound understanding of the human condition. He inspires me and touches me with wisdom.
His accomplishments during his time of incarceration are truly staggering. The books he's written, the degrees he's received, his fellow inmates who he's mentored all make it eminently clear: If Nanon Williams is not allowed to re-enter society, society will be the worse for it.
Family.
Nanon is still in prison. He is still fighting for his freedom.
And he is still building the life he plans to live when he gets it.
Sources
- NBC News (opens in a new tab). “How Rob and Michele Reiner formed a bond with a Texas man sentenced to death,” reported by Dan Slepian. Source for the 2024 Forensic Science Commission report and the history of Lyrics from Lockdown.
- Williams v. Thaler (opens in a new tab). U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, June 19, 2012.
- Amnesty International. 2003 report on the case. Source for the 1998 ballistics letter, the 1999 prosecutor's letter and the state court proceedings.
- Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Death row record: date of offense and date received.
- Making an Exoneree (opens in a new tab). Georgetown University, 2019 reinvestigation.
- Author biography. Early life, from Nanon Williams's published author biography.