‘Compromised’ Video Got Him Life in Prison. He Wants a New Trial. 

In 2011, when James Richardson stood trial for a drive-by double murder outside a nightclub in Greenville, N.C., Pitt County’s district attorney used a surveillance camera video to argue that the former professional basketball player had acted alone, driving a BMW while firing his gun out its passenger window.

Now, Richardson’s lawyers say new evidence proves the video that helped convict him was a misleading, low-quality copy of the original, and that the DA’s lone gunman theory was physically impossible. 

On August 26, they’ll argue before N.C. Superior Court Judge Henry Hight Jr. that these new findings merit a full evidentiary hearing, with sworn witnesses. “We obviously fully believe James is absolutely innocent,” says the Southern Coalition for Social Justice’s Jake Sussman, who leads Richardson’s legal team. Their goal: a new trial. 

Richardson, 48, was convicted of murdering Edgar Landon Blackley and Charles Andrew Kirby in 2011 following a trial marked by conflicting evidence, including testimony from three witnesses who saw multiple people in the car and gave descriptions that didn’t match Richardson.

Clark Everett, then Pitt County’s district attorney, played the lower-quality video five times at trial. It showed the BMW shortly after the shootings and revealed few details, except an unidentifiable driver wearing a shirt that appeared white. “And how many people are in that vehicle? How many?” he asked jurors. “There’s no one else in there, folks. No one else.”

Richardson, who’s serving two life terms at Caswell Correctional Center, northeast of Greensboro, had no criminal record prior to his 2009 arrest. “I’ve said from Day One I’m innocent,” he told The Assembly in a recent interview. He says he doesn’t know who was in the BMW that night, but it wasn’t him. The Assembly previously reported on Richardson’s case in June 2022.

The new evidence includes affidavits from two forensic experts who tested the state’s theory by reconstructing the shooting. One expert used a 3-D digital reconstruction. The other reenacted the shooting by driving the BMW used in the crime while firing the same kind of pistol out its front passenger window.

Both came to the same conclusion—that shell casings from a pistol fired by someone in the driver’s seat would have landed inside the BMW, even if the shooter had been 6-foot-7, like Richardson. Instead, all casings were found outside the car, which supports eyewitness testimony that the shooter was in a passenger seat with his arm outside the window. A new affidavit from a firearms expert, meanwhile, concludes that police retrieved from the scene one bullet that didn’t match the others, indicating that two weapons were fired.

New evidence also includes a video forensic expert’s analysis. The expert, Bryan Neumeister, says in an affidavit that the video was incorrectly exported and downloaded by a Greenville police officer. The result was an inferior copy with “color variations, artifacts and noise that obscured vital details” and “likely could have obscured people or objects.” 

The officer’s action “significantly compromised the integrity of the evidence and image quality,” Neumeister concludes, “destroying any meaningful evidentiary value.”

Everett knew the video was a lower-quality copy. He had a State Bureau of Investigation report that said as much. But he didn’t share that information with jurors. Richardson’s trial lawyers, Jeff Cutler and Tommy Moore, say in sworn affidavits that he didn’t share it with them, either. Everett has said he did share the SBI report about the video with Richardson’s lawyers.

The Pitt County District Attorney’s Office didn’t respond to The Assembly’s interview requests, and the state hasn’t filed a response to Richardson’s new evidence from experts. But in a 2023 response to his earlier motion for a new trial, the state argued that his claims were either without merit or procedurally barred. It said his motion “mischaracterizes as a muddy trickle the sea of eyewitness, biological, forensic, ballistic, and self-inculpating evidence presented to the jury over a two-week trial.” 

The state also argued that affidavits from Richardson’s lawyers claiming they weren’t told about the surveillance video “contain several demonstrably false allegations,” including their argument that the SBI report wasn’t shared with them. 

Shots Into the Crowd

On the night of the murders in 2009, Richardson lived in Atlanta but was visiting Greenville, his hometown. A high school basketball star, he led Pennsylvania’s Slippery Rock University in scoring for two seasons, then played professionally in several European countries and for an NBA developmental league. At 33, he’d recently retired and become a party promoter. 

He’d gone with friends to a Fifth Street nightclub called The Other Place, known as The OP. It was packed. Patrons were drunk. And trouble started, according to trial testimony, after Darren Kennedy, a college student who’d been standing next to Richardson, bumped him twice. According to Kennedy, Richardson responded after the second bump by poking him in the face. Kennedy shoved back. When friends of both men began arguing, bouncers ushered them outside, and the dispute turned into a brawl. 

Witnesses said Richardson got the worst of it. He fell and hit his forehead on the pavement. Extricating himself, he came up bleeding and left. Some people testified they saw him and others in his group head to a parking area around the block. 

Minutes later, a white BMW—the car Richardson had driven earlier that night—turned onto Fifth Street. As it approached the club and slowed, at least five shots were fired into the crowd. Both Blackley, an East Carolina University senior, and Kirby, the manager of a downtown pizza place, died of chest wounds.

At 6-foot-7, Richardson, a light-skinned Black man with green eyes, stood out in a crowd. At the trial, Cutler argued that Greenville police had rushed to judgment because Richardson “was the only person anybody could identify.” Police also testified that they found his DNA in the BMW, though testimony showed he’d driven the car earlier. Within hours, police had issued an arrest warrant. Once he was in custody, they declared the case solved. 

But early on, there was talk in Greenville that police had the wrong person. In a 2022 interview with The Assembly, Everett, now retired as DA, acknowledged he’d heard that some men from Atlanta were involved. He said he asked community members who were questioning Richardson’s arrest to say who did the shooting if not Richardson, but he could never get a name. 

Richardson didn’t testify at his trial, but in 2022, he gave The Assembly his side of the story. The day before the murders, he said, Juhahn Belcher, a close childhood friend, wanted a favor. Belcher, who lived outside Atlanta and had served time for dealing marijuana and cocaine, asked Richardson to give two men from Atlanta a ride from Raleigh to Greenville, about 90 minutes away. Richardson agreed. 

Once in Greenville, the Atlanta men asked to use the BMW Richardson was driving to take care of some business. Again, he agreed. Richardson said he’d previously met one of them, whom he knew as G, at a restaurant. He doesn’t remember the other’s name.

Before they took the car, they dropped Richardson off at his friend Dearl Powell’s house. “I don’t know what exactly they had to do, but it’s something I didn’t want to be a part of,” Richardson told The Assembly. At the trial, Powell corroborated the drop-off and said he suspected the men had something to do with the shooting.

After hanging out with Powell, Richardson eventually borrowed Powell’s bronze Cadillac and drove to a bar called Dr. Unks, where he met his brother, Andre Richardson, and friends. At some point, the two Atlanta men arrived. Now they wanted a different car to finish their business. Richardson says he handed over the Cadillac key. 

Around midnight, Richardson’s group decided to go to The OP. Richardson, who was wearing basketball shorts, a white T-shirt, socks, and flip-flops, wasn’t dressed for clubbing. He went reluctantly, he said. With the Cadillac in use, he drove the BMW. He hadn’t been at the club long when the Atlanta men returned and handed over the Cadillac key. He dropped it in his sock because his shorts had no pockets. 

When the fight started and bouncers herded Richardson and his group outside, he left the BMW keys on the bar. 

After he fell during the brawl outside, a battered Richardson rose and headed toward parking spaces. He didn’t see the BMW, but remembered the Cadillac key in his sock. He found the car and returned it to Powell. At the trial, Powell corroborated this. 

Recanted Testimony

Jury deliberations took four days. Two jurors, including Lamuel Anderson, have said other jurors bullied them into voting guilty. Anderson, a Black prison guard and former police officer, held out for three days before changing his vote. “I have regrets I didn’t take my stand,” he has told The Assembly. 

Six weeks after the verdict, Belcher, who could have identified the two men from Atlanta, was found dead in his home, south of Atlanta. He’d been shot in the head. The murder remains unsolved. 

Powell, Richardson’s friend, has speculated that Belcher “didn’t take it well” when the Greenville nightclub murders were pinned on Richardson, his close friend. “The word was he was going to talk,” Powell told The Assembly in 2022. “That’s why he got killed.”

Richardson’s August 26 hearing marks the first time that a judge has agreed to hear his claims. His lawyers have been seeking a hearing for years, as they’ve continued finding new evidence that they argue raises questions about his guilt. 

In 2014, for example, a new affidavit from Richardson’s brother, Andre, bolstered James’ contention that he wasn’t in the BMW. Andre said he grabbed the BMW keys from the bar when bouncers ushered their group outside. 

On the way out, Andre said he handed them over to one of the Atlanta men when he asked for them. Witness statements describe unnamed men involved in the nightclub fight, raising the possibility, Sussman says, that when they were kicked out of the club they took the BMW and shot into the crowd. 

When Andre got to the parking area, he said, the BMW was gone but he saw his brother getting into a car that looked like it belonged to Powell. He said he hadn’t revealed this information earlier because he’d been afraid. 

In 2017, Vidal Thorpe, the only witness who testified that he saw Richardson shooting out of the BMW, backpedaled when he spoke to Richardson’s investigator. “I don’t even know why they had me testify to that,” he said. He told the investigator he saw three or four people in the car, and an arm holding a gun coming out the rear passenger window. 

Then in 2019, Heather Rattelade, Richardson’s previous attorney, found what she has called “the smoking gun”—the SBI report on the video. 

The document revealed that the video Everett had used was a lower-quality copy, not the original, which no longer existed, though the surveillance camera had produced higher-quality JPEG photos. 

When Rattelade used Adobe Photoshop to enhance several of the photos, they showed fuzzy forms in the car’s front passenger and middle back seat, and a dark image outside the rear passenger window. Richardson’s lawyers argue those are passengers, including one in the backseat with his head out the window. 

The state doesn’t dispute that jurors saw a video that was inferior to the original. But its 2023 response says “the State’s case never hinged solely on these images and rested instead on other overwhelming evidence of the Defendant’s guilt.” 

Sussman, Richardson’s lawyer, argues that Everett used the video to tell a story that was “materially misleading.” If Richardson’s attorneys had known it was an inferior copy, they would have challenged its admissibility and sought a forensics expert to testify that it was unreliable, he said. 

Without the video, he said, the state’s theory of the crime falls apart. And testimony from three witnesses who described men in the BMW who didn’t resemble Richardson takes on greater importance. Two said they saw a man with a gun who wore a hat and sunglasses. He was leaning out of one of the passenger windows. 

“There’s insufficient evidence to bring a case to secure a conviction,” Sussman said, “now that we have the full story about the video.”