NEW YORK — Delbert Tibbs, who in 1974 was convicted of a Florida rape and a murder that he had nothing to do with, died on Nov. 23 at his home in Chicago. He was 74.
His death was confirmed by Andrea Lyon, a law professor at DePaul University who is godmother to Mr. Tibbs’s daughter Mahalia. Lyon said that the cause was uncertain but that Mr. Tibbs had had cancer.
Mr. Tibbs spent nearly three years in prison before the state Supreme Court reversed his convictions, vacated his death sentence, and freed him.
Mr. Tibbs then campaigned for the abolition of capital punishment and became one of six people whose stories of wrongful conviction and near execution were told in “The Exonerated,” a play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, who assembled their script from court documents, testimony, depositions, and letters.
First presented in 2002 in Los Angeles and New York with celebrity-studded casts, the play went on to help reshape the national debate about the death penalty, reaching audiences in productions across the country and then on television in a filmed adaptation starring Susan Sarandon, Brian Dennehy, Aidan Quinn, Danny Glover, and, as Mr. Tibbs, Delroy Lindo.
“People who once argued about the morality of executing the guilty now discuss whether the capital justice system can be trusted to separate those deserving death from the wholly innocent,” Adam Liptak wrote in The New York Times in 2005 in assessing the play’s impact.
Mr. Tibbs had a poetic bent, which led Blank and Jensen to use his character as a kind of Greek chorus, introducing and closing the play and appearing intermittently throughout as a sagelike figure.
The crimes for which he was arrested occurred in Fort Myers, on Florida’s southwest coast, on Feb. 3, 1974. A teenager, Cynthia Nadeau, was raped, and her boyfriend, Terry Milroy, who was in his 20s, was shot to death.
Nadeau’s story was that while hitchhiking, they were attacked by a black man who had picked them up in a green truck. The couple were both white.
Mr. Tibbs was rootless at the time, though not a drifter so much as a seeker. A former seminary student in Chicago, he had himself been hitchhiking across the country and had made his way to Florida.
The case against him had holes. Evidence showed that he was in Daytona Beach on the day of the killing, 250 miles from Fort Myers, and Nadeau’s initial description of her assailant was at odds with Mr. Tibbs’ appearance.
An all-white jury nevertheless found him guilty on the basis of Nadeau’s uncorroborated testimony and a cellmate’s claim that Mr. Tibbs had confessed to the killing in jail.
Mr. Tibbs received a life sentence for the rape and the death sentence for the murder.
But in the summer of 1976, citing the weakness of the evidence against him, the Florida Supreme Court reversed the verdict on appeal and ordered a new trial, saying it did not want to “risk the very real possibility that Tibbs had nothing to do with these crimes.”
He was released from prison in January 1977, and after further legal wrangling — Mr. Tibbs’ lawyers argued that a retrial would amount to double jeopardy — the state dropped its charges against him in 1982. (In 2002, state prosecutors nonetheless said they held to their belief in Mr. Tibbs’ guilt. No one else has been charged with the crimes.)
“I’m a Southern boy,” Mr. Tibbs said in an interview with the oral historian Studs Terkel for his book “Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith,” published in 2001. “My rationale to them for being in the state was just that I wanted to roam across the country, which is typical of writers and artists and so forth, but it’s not typical of black people. It’s all right for Jack Kerouac, but not for Delbert Tibbs.”
In recent years, Mr. Tibbs did volunteer work tutoring at-risk young black men.
He also worked with antideath penalty groups such as Witness to Innocence, founded by the activist nun Helen Prejean and Ray Krone, a former death row inmate in Arizona who was exonerated in 2002, and the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.