An Inmate’s Unlikely Ally

More than 45 years ago, Lexington police detectives helped put Charles McNeair behind bars for a rape he has long maintained he didn’t commit. Now, the town’s current police chief says Gov. Josh Stein should strongly consider granting McNeair clemency.  

In April, Chief Robby Rummage sent a letter to Stein’s office raising questions about McNeair’s continued incarceration and the lack of information surrounding the police investigation that led to his 1980 conviction for second-degree rape and burglary. Rummage’s letter, which has not been previously reported, represents a 360-degree turn for a department whose officers McNeair said beat him during a November 1979 interrogation.

Rummage wrote that in his 26 years in law enforcement he has helped investigate murders resulting in long prison sentences for defendants. But some of those convicted murderers have since been released, while McNeair remains behind bars. 

The police department no longer has the criminal investigative file. It may have been destroyed in the late 1980s based on state-mandated retention schedules, but no one recorded the file’s destruction.

“What remains is a troubling gap: We have no documentation of the investigation that led to Mr. McNeair’s life sentence,” Rummage wrote. “The limited materials we do have do not present a coherent narrative and do not pertain to the offense in question.” 

The Assembly wrote about McNeair’s case in 2023; Rummage said he personally investigated whether the file existed at that time, after we asked a judge to release it. 

McNeair, who is Black, was 16, illiterate, and poor at the time of his arrest, and he lived in a segregated city where the Ku Klux Klan had marched through downtown just months earlier. Lexington’s elected district attorney, the late Butch Zimmerman, was known to regale criminal defense attorneys with tales of slaveowners raping enslaved Black women and to have a collection of Confederate memorabilia in his office.  

McNeair was accused of breaking into a 57-year-old white woman’s home and raping her while holding a hammer and a screwdriver. Police officials then attempted to link him to four other unsolved attacks on white women, without any apparent evidence. 

In the November 1979 incident, McNeair says his lawyer gave him a stark choice: Plead guilty and receive a life sentence, or take his chances at trial and possibly get the death penalty. At that time, there was no death penalty for rape. But McNeair took the deal and has been in prison ever since.

Rummage said McNeair has received significant local support and wouldn’t have received a life sentence if he were convicted of the same crimes today. A defendant convicted on those charges today would likely face a maximum of 10 years in prison.

“Given these facts, I find it difficult to reconcile why Mr. McNeair’s case has not received more meaningful consideration for clemency or release,” he said. 

Rummage’s letter shocked McNeair. 

“I never knew a police chief would … believe somebody like me,” he said in a brief phone interview from Randolph Correctional Center. He had recently been transferred there from Catawba Correctional Center, where he had spent nearly 16 months. 

“Most of them kind of stick together,” he said. “But, you know, he stuck his neck out there.” 

Jamie Lau, McNeair’s attorney and a supervising attorney at Duke Law’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic, said this is the first time he has seen a law enforcement officer raise concerns like this,  but it’s difficult to know how much of an impact Rummage’s letter will have on the governor’s office. 

“I would hope that a letter from the police chief would be significant to the governor’s office,” he said. 

A Meeting in Raleigh

Wanda Cox, a former showroom and interior designer who had emerged as one of McNeair’s most passionate advocates, and other Lexington supporters tried for months to get former Gov. Roy Cooper to grant McNeair clemency before leaving office.

In September 2022, Lau filed a clemency petition with the Juvenile Sentence Review Board, which Cooper established via executive order to revisit sentences handed down to minors. That executive order expired the moment Cooper left office on January 1. 

Cooper’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice pushed for the creation of the board, and his executive order noted that 80 percent of people sent to prison for crimes they committed as teenagers are racial minorities. As attorney general, Stein was co-chair of the task force. 

Nearly 200 inmates filed clemency petitions with the board. Cooper commuted the sentences of 14, said Ben Finholt, a clemency and parole expert at the Wilson Center of Science and Justice at Duke Law. Another 14 completed their sentences and were released before Cooper made a decision. 

The board denied 88 petitions. Finholt said another 75 are now pending before Stein, including McNeair’s, according to data Finholt received from the Governor’s Clemency Office. 

McNeair’s supporters met with members of Stein’s staff on June 17, including Cox; Lexington Mayor Jason Hayes; city council member Garrett Holloway; Rev. Alan Suber, president of the Lexington chapter of the NAACP; Rev. Lester Smith, an associate pastor at Union Baptist Church; Rev. Ray Morgan with the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church; Cheryl Leverette-Lide, who is running for Lexington school board; and local activist Tyrone Terry. 

Cox said Stein’s staff urged them to be patient. 

“I thought Charles had been very patient,” Cox said she told them. 

She said staffers told her that Stein’s administration is still new and they are reviewing McNeair’s petition, but that she was never given a clear answer on whether Stein would re-establish the Juvenile Sentence Review Board. 

Cox said she is frustrated. “We’re now in the 46th year of incarceration,” she said. “When is it enough?”

Stein spokesperson Morgan Hopkins would not comment specifically on McNeair’s case or offer a timeline for review, nor did she address whether Stein will re-establish the review board. 

“All of the petitions submitted to the North Carolina Juvenile Sentence Review Board previously will be reviewed in due course,” she said in a statement. 

Missing File

After more than four decades, McNeair’s case is clouded in mystery and bereft of easy answers. Many of the main players have long since died, and there’s no record of the criminal investigation. 

Here’s what we know: McNeair was 16 and said he met the 57-year-old woman he was accused of raping in October 1979. He was hustling for tips outside the Winn-Dixie store in exchange for carrying customers’ groceries to their cars. McNeair had dropped out of school to help his family. 

He said he and the woman became friends. She told him about her estranged husband, and they hung out, drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana together. Sometimes he would visit her at her house in the 800 block of Fairview Drive in east Lexington. McNeair said that’s what he was doing on November 25, 1979, dressed in striped khakis, a thin brown dress shirt, and tassel loafers. The woman offered him alcohol and marijuana and told him he had to leave by 12:30 a.m. because she was expecting someone.

He said the two started kissing, but he passed out. He could not remember if he had sex with her. All he knew was that he awoke to Roy Owens, a Lexington police officer, beating him on the head and putting him in handcuffs. McNeair said he was hauled off to the downtown police station, where officers kept hitting him and demanded a confession. 

“I felt like they were going to hang me,” McNeair said in 2023. 

At McNeair’s sentencing, Lexington Police Lt. Harold Caudle read a statement from the woman. She said at 4 a.m. she woke up to see McNeair, nude and standing by her bed. She said he was holding a claw hammer and a screwdriver, and she recognized McNeair “clearly, under the illumination of a streetlight.” After he raped her, she said, he fell asleep in her bed. She slipped out, went to a neighbor’s house, and called the police. 

The Assembly tried to piece together what happened all those years ago for our 2023 investigation, but much of the information is missing, lacks details, or suggests a contradicting set of allegations against McNeair. The alleged victim died in 1992. The primary detectives and the prosecutor have died as well. (The alleged victim had three children; two are deceased, but one daughter lives in Lexington. She did not respond to a request for comment.) 

The Assembly filed a motion asking a judge to release the criminal investigative file, which is not a public record. We learned the Lexington Police Department no longer had that file but did have a different investigative file from another alleged rape in August 1979. McNeair was not charged in that case. 

Rummage said in an April 15 interview that it bothered him that there was so little information about the case. He said McNeair’s supporters have raised legitimate questions about the case. 

“There’s no way I can fathom an explanation for why his case did not rise to the level of clemency,” he said. 

Confidential Process

Lau, McNeair’s attorney, said he doesn’t know how much Rummage’s letter will help because the whole clemency review process is confidential. 

He said he has no idea whether the Juvenile Sentence Review Board reviewed McNeair’s petition and made a recommendation to Cooper. Considering that the petition was filed in September 2022, Lau said it is inconceivable that the board hadn’t evaluated it before Cooper left office. 

He said there’s no communication about the decision-making process, and it’s not exactly clear how Stein’s administration will handle the pending petitions, including McNeair’s. Advocates have criticized the board for its lack of transparency and slow review process. 

Lau said the police chief’s letter reflects the support McNeair has from the community. Often, prosecutors argue that a jury’s verdict should be the final say on guilt or innocence. In a way, the community has rendered a new verdict for McNeair, Lau said, “expressed through Lexington’s leaders, the police chief, and everybody calling for the end of Mr. McNeair’s incarceration.” 

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.