Errol Morris’s classic 1988 docudrama The Thin Blue Line helped to exonerate former death row inmate Randall Dale Adams.* He’d been convicted of shooting a Dallas police officer to death during a traffic stop.

On this date in 2004, the man who really pulled the trigger, David Ray Harris, received lethal injection. It wasn’t the murder of Officer Robert Wood he was being punished for: after more or less confessing the crime to Morris’s recorders, Harris was never charged with it. By that time, he was already on death row for an unrelated 1985 murder.

Randall Adams published a book about his ordeal. He died of brain cancer in 2010.

* Adams avoided execution in 1980 and had his sentence commuted. He was still in prison, but no longer on death row, at the time of the film’s release. He was released outright in 1989. Filmmaker Morris describes how he came to make the film — and how Adams “never will be exonerated” officially — in this interview with Bill Moyers.

On this day..

• 1685: Archibald Campbell
• 1797: Richard Parker, for the Nore mutiny
• 1893: A day in the death penalty around the U.S.
• 1948: Meir Tobiansky, by summary judgment
• 1921: Richard and Abraham Pearson, the Coolacrease killings
• 1794: Rosalie Lubomirska, mother of Balzac's antagonist
• 1278: Pierre de La Brosse, "out of spite and envy"
• 1680: A Madrid auto de fe
• 1934: Night of the Long Knives
• 1704: John Quelch, pirate
• 1962: Georges Kageorgis, assassin
• 1882: Charles Guiteau, James Garfield's colorful assassin