On October 2, 2024, the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law marked International Wrongful Convictions Day – a day designed to raise awareness of the causes and remedies of wrongful convictions and to shed light on the tremendous harms wrongful convictions have on individuals, their families, and communities.
Since 1989, 75 people have been exonerated in North Carolina. Collectively, these exonerees lost 963 years to incarceration for crimes they did not commit. Despite a wave of reforms in the state in the early 2000s designed to prevent wrongful convictions, 11 people have been convicted and later exonerated since those reforms. On International Wrongful Convictions Day, the Wilson Center for Science and Justice released its latest report: Wrongful Convictions in North Carolina: Lessons Learned and Recommendations for Continued Reform.
This report documents the reforms instituted in the early 2000s, examines the 11 known wrongful convictions since that time, and makes recommendations for further reform to prevent wrongful convictions and improve the paths to exoneration for those who have been wrongfully convicted.
“North Carolina has demonstrated its capacity to be a leader in addressing wrongful convictions,” says lead report author, Policy Analyst Marcus Pollard. “But our progress as a state since the early 2000s has stalled, and documented cases of wrongful convictions since then show how critical it is that we take further action to prevent people from being imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.”
The report analyzes the wrongful convictions of Timothy Britt, Noe Moreno, Willie Shaw, David Weaver, Curtis Logan, Israel Grant, Knolly Brown, Mark Carver, Horace Shelton, Barshiri Sandy, and Henry Surpris, and it recommends adopting key reforms throughout the criminal legal process:
- Investigation: reforming interrogation policies to prevent false confessions, better documenting eyewitness identification, and establishing better policies around the use of informants.
- Pretrial detention and trial: reforming the detention bond process, protecting non-English speakers by establishing better policies around interpreters, reforming open-file discovery, mandating defense teams have the right to assistance from experts in eyewitness testimony, and establishing professional integrity programs in District Attorney’s Offices.
- Post-conviction review: establishing a conviction integrity unity in the Attorney General’s Office and enacting key changes to the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission.
“To honor the intentionally high standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, our criminal legal system must have robust safeguards at each of these 3 levels to prevent and remedy wrongful convictions. The 11 cases we examined for this report make clear that North Carolina’s current safeguards are not adequate,” says Policy Director and report co-author Angie Weis Gammell. “The improvements we call for in this report would help prevent wrongful convictions in the first place and enable relief for those who need it.”
Read the full report.