Betty Anne Waters: The waitress who became a lawyer

Betty Anne Waters had never intended to become a lawyer, said Robin Pogrebin in The New York Times. But when her younger brother Kenny was wrongfully convicted of the robbery and murder of a neighbor back in 1983, the pub waitress from the small town of Bristol, R.I., started taking law classes at night to help get him freed. “It was Kenny’s idea,” she says. “That’s not what I wanted to do. He always made me feel like I could be anything. Do anything.”

There were times Waters doubted her obsession with freeing Kenny, which caused her marriage to crumble.

After years of studying, she passed the bar, and then spent the better part of 18 years searching for missing evidence and knocking on the doors of witnesses, many of whom admitted they had lied under police pressure. (That story has been dramatized in a new film, Conviction.) Her efforts paid off in 2001 when Kenny’s conviction was reversed, based on DNA evidence she uncovered. Her faith in her brother, she says, always kept her going. “I knew my brother,” she says. “He’s not the aggressor. There was never any doubt in my mind that he was innocent.”

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