An Extraordinary Exoneration

For more than 20 years, brothers Nathaniel Cauthen and Rayshawn Banner, along with Christopher Bryant, Jermal Tolliver, and the late Dorrell Brayboy, claimed they were innocent.  

On Friday, a judge believed them. 

Robert Broadie, a Superior Court judge from Davidson County, exonerated the men in the 2002 death of Nathaniel Jones, the grandfather of NBA star Chris Paul, who now plays for the Los Angeles Clippers. They are now in their mid to late 30s; Brayboy died in 2019, a year after he was released from prison. Bryant and Tolliver were released in 2017. Cauthen and Banner have been serving life sentences. 

Broadie’s 33-page ruling came seven months after he presided over a three-week evidentiary hearing in Forsyth Superior Court. He dismissed the charges against the four living men with prejudice, meaning they cannot be tried again. 

Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill’s office has filed a notice of appeal, and state Attorney General Jeff Jackson’s office filed a petition Tuesday asking the state Court of Appeals to issue a temporary stay. The Court of Appeals granted the stay, which means that Cauthen and Banner won’t be getting out anytime soon. 

Christine Mumma, an attorney for Banner and Cauthen, said prosecutors don’t have a right to appeal when charges are dismissed with prejudice. She said she plans to oppose the temporary stay to get the two men released as soon as possible. 

Broadie’s decision came three years after a three-judge panel upheld their convictions. That followed an investigation by the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission, which found that a key witness had recanted. New DNA testing showing none belonged to the boys also bolstered the men’s innocence claims.

“I’m so glad they’ll finally be able to have a life,” Jessicah Black, the witness who recanted her trial testimony, told The Assembly this week. 

O’Neill blasted the ruling in a statement he gave to the Winston-Salem Journal while acknowledging that it would be difficult to appeal: “I have never seen that happen before in a court of law. Most judges welcome scrutiny and appellate review of their decisions, especially when it concerns five convicted murderers whose convictions were recently upheld during a lengthy North Carolina Innocence Commission inquiry hearing.”

O’Neill, who had previously castigated the commission in an unrelated case, did not respond to a request for comment from The Assembly. (The N.C. Senate recently proposed eliminating the commission.) Annie Sims, a spokeswoman for the Winston-Salem Police Department, said police officials would not comment as long as there is pending litigation. 

Friday’s exoneration was a stunning disruption of the narrative surrounding Nathaniel Jones’ 2002 murder. 

The Assembly first reported on the case in July 2023. Jones, 61, was a proprietor of what was believed to be the first Black-owned service station in North Carolina. Winston-Salem police said Jones was attacked on November 15, 2002, soon after he arrived at his East Winston-Salem home. Police said he was beaten in the head and face and left to die of a cardiac arrhythmia; he was found lying face down in the carport near his Lincoln Town Car. His hands were tied behind his back with black tape, and his mouth was taped shut. His wallet was missing.

Paul, now 40, grew up in Lewisville, 10 miles outside Winston-Salem, and was a standout player for West Forsyth High School when his grandfather was killed. A day earlier he’d signed to play for Wake Forest University in front of numerous cameras, the culmination of the work ethic his grandfather helped instill in him. Days after his grandfather’s death, Paul scored 61 points in Jones’ honor, intentionally missing a free throw to match the age at which he’d died. That moment catapulted him into the national spotlight. 

Banner was 14, and Cauthen, Bryant, Tolliver, and Brayboy were all 15 at the time they were arrested. 

Many, including Paul’s family, thought the case was closed after the five teenagers were convicted in two separate trials in 2004 and 2005. In his 2023 memoir, Sixty-One: Life Lessons from Papa, On and Off the Court, Paul said he still believed the men were guilty but was conflicted about their lengthy sentences. His family has also said they believe the men committed the crime. 

Neither Jones’ family nor Paul could be reached for comment. Prominent Winston-Salem attorney Michael Grace, who has represented the family, could not be reached for comment. Paul has not yet made any public statements about the ruling. 

In the last several years, new questions have been raised, particularly after Black recanted. The five teenagers always maintained their innocence, contending that police used harsh interrogation tactics to coerce them into making false confessions. And no definitive physical evidence linked them to the crime scene. 

Broadie specifically cited Black’s recantation in his ruling, saying he thought it was credible and significant. If Black had not testified falsely, “a different result would have been reached in the defendants’ trials,” he wrote. 

In January, Black withstood withering cross-examination from prosecutors, who alleged she told the truth at the original trials and was now lying. At times, Black was inconsolable on the stand.  

Black, who was 16 at the time of the arrests, was exuberant about the ruling when reached on Monday but said she is still weighed down by guilt about her role in the teens’ fate. She also is angry at police detectives who she said yelled, spit in her face, threatened her and told her she would get a life sentence if she didn’t cooperate. 

“It’s crooked. Crooked and dirty,” she said. “I think they knew they were dealing with a bunch of kids. … They lied. They lied a lot. They told me they had so much evidence that they had, and they didn’t.” 

Feeling Free

Mumma said she learned about Broadie’s ruling at 2:30 p.m. Friday while giving a presentation to incoming law students at Campbell University. 

She said she could hardly breathe. She didn’t get to read the actual ruling until later that afternoon. Around 5 p.m. she was able to get in touch with Banner, who is being held at Mountain View Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine. 

Banner didn’t say a word, Mumma said. He sobbed and wailed for a long time. 

Tolliver was driving when his attorney called him with the news. Tolliver said he was so overwhelmed, he had to pull over. Even after he got out of prison in February 2017, he still felt like he was locked up. 

“Now, I feel free,” he said. 

Tolliver called Bryant, who was working at Smurfit Westrock, a paper and packaging company. He said he was happy to hear the news but added it has been tough living the past few years as a convicted felon. 

“I never got over it, to be honest,” he said. “I just try to move forward.” 

Bryant was 30 when he got out of prison. He’s now 38. 

“My childhood, everything was snatched from me, so I had to endure stuff while I was in prison, go through stuff and learn to be a man while locked up. And for what, though?” Bryant said. “I wasn’t supposed to go through none of that because we didn’t do it.”

Winston-Salem police spent the first few days after the high-profile murder canvassing the neighborhood where Jones lived and following up on leads. Detectives began focusing on the five teenagers after Tolliver’s mother reportedly said her son had acted strangely since Jones’ death. (Tolliver’s mother disputes this.) 

They were brought into police interrogation rooms and interviewed for hours. The teenagers later claimed that every time they told police they didn’t kill Jones, they were called liars. They testified that detectives alternately screamed at them and then assured them they could go home if they just told the “truth.” 

Four of them said detectives threatened that the death penalty could be used against them—which wouldn’t have been possible because North Carolina had eliminated capital punishment for juveniles in 1987. Bryant said one of the detectives pointed to a place on Bryant’s arm and said that would be where the needle for lethal injection would go. 

“I was scared for my life,” Cauthen said at a pretrial hearing. “I thought the police would do something to my life if I didn’t admit to the crime. I felt my life was in danger.” 

Winston-Salem police didn’t mention in their notes or reports that they had threatened the boys with the death penalty, but years later, detectives Sean Flynn and Stan Nieves admitted to staffers with the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission that they did invoke it. An audio clip of Flynn’s interview with a staff attorney was played at a 2022 commission hearing. 

When the staff attorney asked why he mentioned the death penalty, Flynn said, “To elicit a response.” 

The attorney pressed Flynn. 

“A truthful response,” Flynn responded. 

In 2002, detectives also played audio clips of one teen’s statement to another to get them to confess. 

The teenagers each spent between five and eight hours at the police station. None of them had lawyers; Banner was the only one who signed a waiver to his right to an attorney. (The teenagers’ statements would not be admissible in court under current state law.)

Their statements were inconsistent with each other and with the physical evidence. They didn’t agree on who participated in the beating, who served as lookouts, who unscrewed the lightbulbs in the carport, or whether the robbery was planned or spontaneous. 

They couldn’t even agree on what weapons they used. 

Police never found their fingerprints at the scene. And subsequent testing done by the Innocence Commission showed that none of the teenagers’ DNA was found at the crime scene. 

But it was Black’s testimony at their two trials that truly sealed their fate. 

Under Pressure

In 2002, Black was a teenager living in Davidson County. She had met Banner, Cauthen, Bryant, Tolliver, and Brayboy a few months before Jones’ death. They all became fast friends, and Black was the only one with a driver’s license. The teenagers would cruise around in her 1986 Mercury Cougar.

Black says now that they were just teenagers having fun. Days after Jones’ death, she found herself in a Winston-Salem police interview room with grown men with guns in their holsters. Black said they told her she was lying when she said the boys weren’t involved, and that they found Jones’ blood in her car, which wasn’t true. They told her she would get a life sentence if she didn’t cooperate. 

They told her she could go home if she complied. And so she did. 

At both trials, she testified that she had heard the teens talk about robbing someone. She said she took them to two stores to purchase the black tape used to tie up Jones, even though neither store carried that kind of tape. She said she drove them to the area near Jones’ house and sat on a bench in Belview Park where she could hear them screaming at Jones while they beat him and Jones cried out for help. 

Six years ago, she recanted that testimony to former Houston Chronicle reporter Hunter Atkins in a phone interview and then later at an IHOP restaurant in Winston-Salem. She has since recanted under oath multiple times, including over two days at the January evidentiary hearing.  

During that testimony, prosecutor Mark Parent played the 33-minute audio recording of her 2002 statement to Winston-Salem police. The other hour and a half she spent in questioning was not recorded. 

In the recording, Black’s voice is soft and calm as officers ask her questions to clarify her statement. The most powerful part of the statement is Black telling officers that she could hear them telling Jones to “get the fuck down” and “give me that shit” from where she sat on the bench. 

Black says now that police detectives manipulated her. She didn’t even know that Jones was likely attacked around 6:30 p.m. on November 15. If she had known, she would have told the detectives that most of the boys were with her the whole time, she said, driving around the neighborhood and later going to a bowling alley. She said Banner was the only one not with the group that evening. 

Detectives, she said, “were just looking for someone to pin it on,” she said. 

Mumma said detectives manipulated and threatened Black until she felt she had no choice but to tell them what they wanted to hear. 

“It’s so important to recognize that she was lied to,” Mumma said. “Like she’s trying to draw a logical conclusion to how the victim’s blood could have gotten into her car.” 

It was only when she realized how much she was lied to that Black became angry and determined to rectify the situation, Mumma said. 

“Because not only was she responsible for their conviction, she could have been their alibi if she had known the truth,” she said. 

‘Extraordinary Failures’

Broadie’s ruling is the second-most significant exoneration in Winston-Salem in the last two decades. The first was Darryl Hunt, who was exonerated in 2004, the same year Cauthen and Banner were convicted of first-degree murder in Jones’ death. 

Hunt’s case, along with several other high-profile wrongful convictions, led to the creation of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission.

It’s also the second case from Winston-Salem in which the commission played a key role. The first involved Merritt Drayton Williams, whose murder conviction was vacated in 2022 after the commission’s work led to new DNA evidence implicating another person, who confessed to solely committing the crime. 

Attorney Mark Rabil also represented Hunt, who committed suicide in 2016. He represented Tolliver and Brad Bannon represented Bryant. Rabil called Broadie’s decision extraordinary.

“It’s a 1-in-1,000-type ruling, maybe even a 1-in-10,000-type ruling,” he said Friday. “You just never see rulings like this.”

Broadie granted relief on nearly every claim the four men brought in the motions for appropriate relief that they filed in 2023, a year after the three-judge panel upheld their convictions. The men claimed not only newly discovered evidence with Black’s recantation and new DNA evidence, but also poor legal representation and police detectives’ use of harsh interrogation techniques on vulnerable teenagers. 

“It is a huge victory in the innocence world,” said Rabil, who directs Wake Forest Law School’s Innocence and Justice Clinic. 

Mumma said the ruling is extraordinary because the failures in this case were extraordinary. 

“You literally don’t get cases where everything was done wrong,” said Mumma, who is the executive director of the nonprofit North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence. “There was nothing about this trial or the investigation of the murder that was right. So that opens it up for all the claims we had.”

Mumma compared the case to the Central Park Five: the five teenagers who were ultimately exonerated on charges that they raped a jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989. In both cases, the police detectives interrogated the teenagers for hours without legal representation, calling them liars and threatening them until they gave false statements, Mumma said. 

O’Neill told the Winston-Salem Journal that his office and the state Attorney General’s Office will “continue to pursue justice on behalf of Nathaniel Jones and his family, until he can rest in peace.” 

Black said she is glad that she had a chance to make up for her mistake more than 20 years ago. She has kept her distance from her old teenage friends but had a chance to hug Tolliver and Bryant during the three-judge panel hearing in 2022. They told her they loved her and that they forgave her. Tolliver reiterated that again this week. 

Now, Black said, she hopes the men can live their lives to the fullest. 

“Those boys are getting what they deserve,” she said. 

Michael Hewlett is a staff reporter at The Assembly. He was previously the legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. You can reach him at michael@theassemblync.com.