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Update: Gov. Roy Cooper commuted the sentences of all three men in July 2024. Without the commutations, all three could have remained behind bars until 2061.
On April 13, 2008, three masked men walked into Mitchell County’s Ridgeview Presbyterian Church. One carried duct tape, and two brandished handguns. The two armed men threatened the 16 congregants while the other bound their hands.
They took cell phones, keys, wallets, and $370 cash from the offering plate. At one point, one of the guns was accidentally discharged into the ground, inches from a teenage girl.
“If you leave the church before 30 minutes or call the police, we’ll come back and blow your fucking heads off,” one of the masked men told congregants, according to a victim statement.
In the week leading up to the robbery, Josiah Deyton, who was 18 at the time, approached his coworker at the KFC/Taco Bell in Spruce Pine, Jonathan Koniak. Koniak, 20 at the time, had just moved to Mitchell County a few months before the robbery, and prior to that bounced around different living situations and slept in his car for a spell. When Deyton asked him to take part in a robbery, he thought his new friend was joking, Koniak recalled. But Deyton was serious, and he needed someone with a car—someone like Koniak.
“I just went along with his plan,” Koniak told The Assembly in a recent phone interview from Scotland Correctional Institute, where he’s been since April 2013. “Pretty stupid decision. I wasn’t brave enough to tell him no.”
Deyton had stolen a .25-caliber pistol from his grandmother and a .357 from the owner of a computer store where he also worked. On the morning of the robbery, Deyton met up with his 19-year-old brother, Andrew, who had been living in Maryland but was in town for their grandfather’s funeral. The brothers rendezvoused with Koniak and piled into his car, stopping by a Dollar General to get sodas, some gum, and duct tape before making their way to Tipton, a picturesque rural community of farmland and modest homes. Their first stop was a Baptist church, but they got spooked and headed down the road.
At 11:30 a.m., they pulled into the parking lot of Ridgeview Presbyterian, atop a small hill overlooking a dell so beautiful that it might make a man think twice. But after the last false start, the three men felt even more determined, and entered the church.
As the men left, the pastor caught a glimpse of Koniak’s sedan. One person who still had their cell phone called the police. Before long, as they were on their way back to Koniak’s house, they were pulled over by an attentive sheriff’s deputy. They immediately admitted to what they’d done. A quick search of their vehicle turned up the stolen property, as well as the ski masks and firearms.
The traumatized victims said they had trouble returning to their house of worship.
“Everyone is not over it, including myself,” one congregant told The Presbyterian Outlook. Since it happened, “it’s just been a nervous type thing at the church.”
But this story begins before that heinous and foolish crime, and will end long after.
Barely adults when they robbed that church, their attorneys told them they would spend 10, maybe 15 years in prison. But despite their youth and rough upbringings marked by parental neglect and substance abuse, Superior Court Judge James L. Baker, taking issue with the fact they had robbed a church, gave each of them 53 years and four months to 71 years and eight months behind bars, depending on their conduct while locked up. Their attorneys stated in affidavits that it was a “de facto life sentence.”
Their appeals have so far been denied, but these men, now 34, 35, and 36, have another chance for freedom, for a life on the outside: Gov. Roy Cooper.
While the General Assembly has stripped the executive branch of many powers over the last several years, Cooper still has the sole power to grant commutation, meaning his signature can secure someone’s release from prison. Cooper has used his clemency power selectively in his first seven years in office, focusing mainly on people of color and inmates who committed their crimes as juveniles.
But that could change during his last month in office.
An Unexpected Sentence
All three took the same deal and pleaded guilty to 10 counts of robbery with a dangerous weapon and one count of conspiracy. Their attorneys argued that a lenient sentence was in order. Their clients were immature, desperate, and foolish; most importantly, they cooperated with law enforcement, the lawyers said. The crime was more harebrained than cold-blooded, not the work of seasoned criminals, they said.
The defendants spoke at their sentencing hearing on Aug. 25, 2008, each lamenting the horrid nature of the crime. Josiah Deyton also took responsibility for planning the robbery.
“It was my idea, and I’m sorry to involve my friend and brother in this,” he said to Baker. “I don’t want them to be gone forever.”
Judge Baker made it clear how offended he was, not only with the crime itself, but even more so by the venue. If there’s one place in the world someone ought to feel safe, it’s a church. He told the defendants that they’d taken “God’s money,” currency that’s “being tendered by people for the furtherance of an earthly kingdom.”
“There is scripture that says, ‘Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord’ but every now and then I think the judicial system has to contribute what it can,” he said before handing down the sentences.
The defense attorneys have all admitted in affidavits that the length caught them off guard and made them second guess whether they should have even accepted the plea arrangement. Rapists and murderers are often sentenced to less.
“In all my years of practice, I cannot recall ever seeing anyone sentenced as harshly as the defendants in this case for a crime of this nature,” Jack Stewart, who represented Koniak up to the point he was sentenced, wrote in a May 2018 affidavit. “This was an offense where no one was hurt, and no one was injured. No property was destroyed. My client confessed, cooperated, and accepted responsibility for his actions.”
The three young men were devastated. When going through processing, Josiah Deyton had a panic attack. Koniak said that after the sentencing, his older brother came up to him, carrying his newborn son.
“He was standing there with tears in his eyes, and I just started crying,” Koniak said. “I realized my life was pretty much over.”
“I just went along with his plan. Pretty stupid decision. I wasn’t brave enough to tell him no.”
Jonathan Koniak
Sixteen years later, Baker stood by the sentence in an interview with The Assembly. He took umbrage with the inference that his own Christian faith influenced the sentence, saying the crime would have been “just as shocking” if the target had been a “synagogue or a mosque”—anywhere people may worship.
“I just thought that degree of disregard for other people was particularly atrocious,” he said.
The Deyton brothers and Koniak were at the same facility for the first couple of years of their sentences. Josiah Deyton said he told his brother and Koniak of the guilt he continued to feel about roping them into the robbery, but they both took responsibility, admitting they had been uneasy about the plan but didn’t have the heart to stop it.
“How can I be mad at him for something that I allowed myself to do?” Koniak said in his interview from prison.
Their attorneys appealed at the state and federal levels, arguing that Baker’s sentence was influenced by his personal religious beliefs. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the sentence, stating in its ruling that Baker’s language at the bench reflected the victims’ experiences more than his own feelings.
“The robbery of, say, a bank or convenience store is bad enough,” the ruling reads. “But the intentional selection of a church as a target and of worship services as the time of attack merits special condemnation because it is equally an assault on religious liberty as it is on physical safety. It would be odd indeed if the armed robbery of worshipers and violent threats to parishioners did not elicit strong condemnation at sentencing.”
Although attorneys petitioned the United States Supreme Court to hear the case, SCOTUS declined, and any chance to get the sentences overturned on appeal was dead.
The appeal process and the clemency petition were both taken on by attorneys with North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm that ensures inmates can exercise their rights to court access even while incarcerated. That office reviews post-conviction claims and determines whom to represent. While most cases aren’t deemed viable, there are some worth bringing before courts of appeal or the governor.
In July 2020, three attorneys from Prisoner Legal Services wrote Cooper asking for the sentences to be commuted. Among them was Mary Pollard, who was director of Prisoner Legal Services from 2009 to 2020, when she left to become director of the state’s Indigent Defense Services Office. She was granted permission to continue work on this case until a clemency decision is made.
“There is scripture that says, ‘Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord’ but every now and then I think the judicial system has to contribute what it can.”
Superior Court Judge James L. Baker
“I felt like I couldn’t leave the job without doing this,” Pollard said. “Other cases that bothered me this much were either fixed or are still in the court system.”
The petition reaffirms many of the points about mitigating factors that the defense attorneys brought up in the initial trial, while adding context about the years leading up to the crime. It includes statements from the inmates, as well as members of their family. The Deytons’ mother, Rhonda Hollifield, wrote that their grandfather, whose funeral Andrew was in town to attend when the robbery was committed, had died just a week prior. Her sons had been close with him.
“They adored my dad, and my dad adored them,” Hollifield said in an interview. “He doted on them.”
A few years before the robbery, Hollifield had left one abusive relationship and got into another. She’d developed a serious alcohol addiction that resulted in several stints in jail for DWIs, and social services stepped in and took Hollifield’s two youngest children from her. Andrew and Josiah, the oldest of her eight kids, had an outsized role in their household before moving out after constant conflict with their mother.
“Andrew and Josiah had a lot of responsibility with having as many brothers and sisters as they did, and with me trying to work they just had more responsibility on probably than what they needed,” Hollifield said.
Josiah said he was homeless and lived with several people for brief stints before the robbery. Same with Andrew.
“I don’t think I lived in any one place more than six months at a time a couple years before that,” Andrew said.
Koniak had a similar upbringing in an abusive household before leaving home at 18. In the intervening two years, he’d had various roommates and at one point lived in his car.
The clemency petition argues this is evidence these men don’t belong in prison.
“None of them had any significant criminal history and could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered hardened criminals,” the petition reads. “None of them had the benefit of a stable family structure or a safe home during childhood and adolescence. None of them came from environments that offered them any opportunity to learn or grow or develop to a responsible maturity in a timely fashion.”
Nearly four years later, they continue to maintain jobs and good records of conduct and are still awaiting an answer. Koniak said it’s hard to maintain a sense of purpose. That he could be freed at any time with the simple stroke of the governor’s pen creates both hope and anxiety. Koniak said whenever he gets a legal letter during mail call, he can’t help but feel it may be an answer on the clemency petition.
“It’s nerve-racking,” he said.
Counting on Commutation
The odds may not be in their favor, considering Cooper’s clemency decisions up to this point.
During his first term, Cooper granted zero commutations and zero pardons. He doled out his first round of clemency in December 2020 shortly after securing his second term in office. Last December, he pardoned four individuals and commuted one sentence. If Cooper denies the men clemency, they may file new petitions in three years. Pollard said that if Cooper declines to make a decision on the petitions, because the next governor will establish their own rules, they can decide on the existing petition at any time.
But all of those decisions were made based on the recommendation of the Juvenile Sentence Review Board (JSRB), which was created through an April 2021 executive order based on a report from the governor’s Taskforce for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice. That report found that people incarcerated for crimes committed as juveniles are disproportionately Black, upwards of 75 percent.
The executive order establishing the board specifically states that because the brains of people under 18 aren’t fully developed, they can’t control their actions like adult offenders and are therefore less culpable at the time of the offense. But research has shown that the frontal lobe—the part of the brain that controls impulses and emotions and is responsible for decision making—isn’t fully formed until more like 25. So, while the Deytons and Koniak don’t qualify for juvenile board review, the very science cited in the executive order backs up the argument that they should be.
“None of them had any significant criminal history and could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered hardened criminals.”
Clemency petition filed for the three men
A recent Massachusetts Supreme Court decision set a precedent that will prohibit life sentences without the possibility of parole for anyone under the age of 21, calling such sentences “cruel and unusual punishment,” a violation of a person’s Eighth Amendment rights.
The governor’s clemency office reviews all petitions, regardless of whether they qualify for juvenile JSRB review. But that process is opaque. Not even the number of cases that come before the board is considered public record, let alone details of how it considers cases and makes recommendations. Cooper’s counsel and press office responded to questions with only a brief statement about what the governor considers.
“Cases for clemency or pardon follow an intensive review of many elements, including outcomes in court, circumstances of the crimes, the sentences, records in prison, victim impacts and more,” the statement says, words that reflect the text of the executive order establishing the JSRB. “The Office of the Governor, including the offices of Executive Clemency and General Counsel, carefully reviews all petitions for clemency.”
Ben Finholt started the Just Sentencing Project in 2019 while working for Pollard at Prisoner Legal Services. In 2020, he was part of a data team supporting the NC Task Force on Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, and in that capacity, Finholt drafted the document that eventually became Cooper’s executive order.
While Finholt said he doesn’t have any direct knowledge of the governor’s process, he postulated that because there were significant edits from what he submitted to Cooper’s office that his counsel used extreme care in crafting the language.
“This is something the governor’s office took very seriously,” Finholt said.
Up In The Air
Even Judge Baker, who is now retired, said that while he stands by his sentence, if the men have shown growth in prison, he wouldn’t oppose a commutation of their sentences. He said he recognized that nearly 16 years, while a fraction of the sentence he imposed, is a long time to spend locked up.
“I recognize they were young, and I’m not going to attempt to stand in the way or to block clemency,” he said. “If the governor thought that they had served sufficient time for what they did, then that’s the governor’s decision.”
Jamie Lau, the supervising attorney for Duke University’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic, hasn’t worked on the clemency case involving the Deytons and Koniak but is familiar with the case. He said that while the Deytons and Koniak admitted to their crime and deserved incarceration, they’ve proven through their work behind bars that being locked up is a waste of human capital. He said that’s often the case with his clients and pointed to how successful others Cooper has granted clemency have been, citing Anthony Willis and April Barber, who were released in 2022.
“[Willis and Barber] are out there doing the work,” Lau said. “They’re doing everything they can to help and utilize what they learned to be of service to others.”
But the political calculus isn’t that simple, and clemency comes with a risk for the grantor. While there are plenty of success stories, it just takes one mistake, one person to commit an act of violence after clemency to bring a world of scrutiny down on Cooper’s head. His absolute power to rectify what the system can’t also comes with great liability. Cooper is about to reach a term limit as governor, but at 66, he still may have a political career ahead of him, including a potential Senate run or a cabinet position in a future presidential administration.
Several sources interviewed for this article brought up the story of Willie Horton, a man who in 1986 committed rape, assault, and armed robbery while out on furlough in Massachusetts during his sentence for a 1974 murder. Michael Dukakis was the governor of Massachusetts at the time Horton committed his violent acts, and in 1976 he vetoed a bill that would have prevented first-degree murder convicts like Horton from taking part in the furlough program.
When Dukakis ran against George H.W. Bush for president in 1988, Bush brought Horton up frequently in speeches and launched a now-infamous attack ad widely considered to have sealed Dukakis’ defeat.
“By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate,” Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater was quoted as saying.
Similarly, in the 2022 Senate campaign, Republican candidate Ted Budd put out ads criticizing Democrat Cheri Beasley for crimes committed by people let out of prison after the state Supreme Court let them out of prison on appeal during Beasley’s time as chief justice.
But Lau and Finholt say that political threat is often exaggerated, and that the governor’s recent round of clemency indicates he’s going to keep exercising that power.
Cooper could grant clemencies after the November election, in his lame-duck period when it wouldn’t affect Democrats on the ballot. While some governors have granted the bulk of their clemency near the end of their term—at the end of last year, outgoing Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards granted clemency for 56 individuals—the political criticism surrounding lame-duck clemencies has been most prominent among outgoing presidents for federal cases. Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump granted large numbers of pardons and commutations near the ends of their terms.
“I’m optimistic that if there are cases where [Cooper] feels like he can make a difference and do the right thing, he’ll do that after the November 2024 election,” Lau said.
The Case for Clemency
The records for the Deytons and Koniak have been exemplary. Andrew Deyton, now incarcerated at Franklin Correctional Center, has two infractions during his 15 years of incarceration for lock tampering and possessing an unauthorized electronic device. Josiah, at Caswell Correctional Center, has zero. He attributes that success to support and frequent visits from his family.
“That really has given me a lot of hope and a lot of help, the ability to cope with what I am dealing with,” he said.
Koniak has seven infractions, but only one in the last eight years. One previous infraction was for fighting, but Koniak, small in stature and conflict-averse, said that was self defense at worst.
“I actually think he just hit me and then the bulls came in,” he said.
He said “possessing an image device” and “high-risk behavior” stemmed from an incident wherein he was caught with a pornographic image.
Koniak has found purpose and meaning through service in prison. He now has a job translating the written word into Braille, mostly for the N.C. Department of Public Instruction to help blind children in public schools. It took him the better part of a year to learn Braille and gain the necessary certification, and shows his growth as a person while incarcerated, he said.
Koniak recalled that not long after he was sentenced, his grandmother, who passed away last year, posed a simple question that helped encourage him: “Who do you want to be?”
“For better or worse, people change,” Koniak said. “I’m 36 now, and I was locked up when I was 20. I wouldn’t say I didn’t know what I was doing then, but I would say that I’ve made a change for the better.”
Andrew Deyton has bounced around between different jobs in prison, from sewing in the clothes shop to fabricating signs, but has always maintained consistent employment.
Josiah Deyton works for a program called “At Both Ends of the Leash,” through “Eyes Ears Nose and Paws,” a program that trains mobility assistance and medical alert dogs. He loved dogs as a kid, he said, and made it a goal to get into that program as soon as he heard about it.
“I don’t know if it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, but it’s pretty awesome,” he said.
Even though their victims at Ridgeview Presbyterian experienced emotional trauma, at least three of them have come forward to say they believe mercy is in order. Jerry and Helen Garland said in affidavits attached to the clemency petition that the men deserve a second chance.
“I believe that the sentences that the judge imposed on the three boys were excessive,” wrote Helen Garland. “The robbery was a terrible, terrible thing but everyone deserves a second chance … It would be a waste to keep these three young men in prison until they are in their seventies or even longer.”
Brown Gortney also provided an affidavit.
“I am a Christian, and my belief is that I should love and forgive everyone and should not have hatred or bitterness toward anyone,” Gortney wrote. “I would like to see their sentences reduced and hope the Governor or any other authority would do that in this case.”
Hollifield said she’s grateful for how her sons have “turned their lives around.”
“They have just become men that I’m so proud of,” Hollifield said.
“They had no business doing it,” she said. “ But they didn’t deserve to have their whole life taken away from them.”
Pollard, Lau, and Finholt, in one way or another, all posed the same question—if rehabilitation is an aim of incarceration and these men have shown signs of achieving that, then what’s the purpose of keeping them locked up?
“They’ve shown they can and should be released back into the community,” Pollard said.
Andrew Deyton dreams of seeing his family again, all in the same place. Koniak said he’d like a good meal, and a chance to thank people who have helped him on his journey.
Josiah Deyton said he’d first like a good bath. Even more so, he wants the chance to show people that he’s changed, that redemption and rehabilitation are possible.
“I’ll prove anybody who thinks I’m not worth letting out and getting a second chance wrong,” he said.
Correction: The year Gov. Cooper granted clemency to Anthony Willis and April Barber has been corrected. It was in 2022.
Kyle Perrotti is the news editor at The Smoky Mountain News. He lives and works in the shadows of the Plott Balsams with his wife, Tiffani, and pup, Corby.