Abolishing Innocence

Last week, Clarence Roberts, through his attorneys, fought to prove his innocence to three superior court judges. On April 16, they believed him, voting unanimously to overturn a second-degree murder conviction and set the Fayetteville man free after 12 years of incarceration. 

He became the 16th person exonerated through the work of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. He also might be the last. 

The North Carolina Senate eliminated the commission’s funding in its $32.6 billion budget proposal. On the same day Roberts was released, state senators gave final approval to the budget proposal in a 31-16 vote. The proposed budget now goes to the House, which will release its own spending plan. The two chambers will have to reach consensus on a final budget. 

The commission is unique not only in North Carolina but in the nation. With a $1.6 million budget and about 12 employees, the small state-funded agency reviews and investigates thousands of post-conviction innocence claims. The agency’s employees have the legal authority to subpoena witnesses, conduct DNA testing, and discover potentially new evidence, all without a court order. 

It also brands itself as an independent and neutral organization, and says that if it finds evidence of a defendant’s guilt, it will close the investigation and turn over evidence to law enforcement officials.  

Laura Pierro, the commission’s executive director, expressed shock about the proposed budget cut. The commission, she said, continues to be relevant and is not a waste of resources. Pierro said she was asked recently to testify before the Senate of Canada, which is considering an innocence commission. (Texas state legislators are also considering a bill that would establish an innocence commission.) 

The commission’s work, she said, not only helps free wrongfully convicted people but also can confirm an offender’s guilt. 

“We provide the solemn service of swiftly and efficiently correcting injustices as soon as possible to avoid unwarranted years of incarceration and resultant excess of taxpayer dollars paid in compensation,” she said.

Over its nearly 19-year existence, the Innocence Commission’s work has led to several high-profile exonerations, including Greg Taylor, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1993. The commission also was responsible for the exoneration of Leon Brown and Henry McCollum, two brothers with intellectual disabilities who authorities coerced into signing false confessions for the rape and murder of a young girl in 1983. Both men got the death penalty, but Brown was later resentenced to life; McCollum spent 30 years on death row before he was exonerated. 

During a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting, Republican Sen. Danny Britt said the commission had failed to handle enough cases. He said other nonprofit organizations, such as N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, could take up the slack if the commission were abolished. 

“They could do that with no expense to the state,” Britt said. “That’s why we chose the cut.” 

Britt did not respond to requests for comment from The Assembly. 

No Easy Task

Since it began work in 2007, the commission has reviewed more than 3,800 claims. It is a long road for a defendant’s claim to get to a hearing before the eight-member commission board. Commission staff could immediately dismiss if the defendant doesn’t claim factual innocence. And the claim might not make it to the commission board because investigators didn’t find enough evidence of innocence to move forward. 

Only 0.5 percent of those claims make it to a hearing before the commission board. That board is made up of prosecutors, judges, sheriffs, defense attorneys, victims’ advocates, and community members. The chief justice appoints five members, and the chief judge of the Court of Appeals appoints three members. If a defendant’s conviction was based on a guilty plea, the board has to unanimously vote to send the claim to a three-judge panel. A defendant whose conviction came out of a trial needs at least five members of the board voting in favor. 

If a claim makes it this far, the chief justice selects three superior court judges to hold an evidentiary hearing to determine if the defendant should be exonerated. The decision has to be unanimous, and defendants cannot appeal the judges’ ruling. 

Roberts first filed his claim with the Innocence Commission in 2017, soon after his trial. It took until August 2023 before the commission board held a hearing and voted 6-2 to send his case to a three-judge panel. 

Without the commission’s work, Roberts likely would still be in prison, said Reid Cater, one of his attorneys. 

Roberts was accused of opening fire at a Lumberton playground in June 2013,  killing 22-year-old Joshua Floyd Council. The murder weapon was never found, and no physical evidence linked him to the crime scene. But police arrested Roberts later that day after police found him in his car parked in a ditch. He was charged with driving while impaired.

Witnesses said the shooter had driven off in a white car, and prosecutors alleged that Roberts was so intoxicated that he didn’t remember shooting Council, Cater said. 

Roberts was initially charged with first-degree murder, three counts of attempted murder, and three counts of assault with a deadly weapon. Prosecutors pursued the death penalty, but a jury found Roberts guilty of second-degree murder and one count of assault with a deadly weapon. He was sentenced to 25 to 31 years in prison. 

Cater said proving Roberts’ innocence was far from an easy task. Cater said it might have been difficult for a nonprofit innocence organization to take on Roberts’ case because there was no DNA evidence, and the murder weapon was never found. Roberts also didn’t have any claims about poor legal representation or allegations that prosecutors withheld evidence that might have helped his case. 

Roberts’ case didn’t have a “silver bullet piece of evidence,” Cater said. Instead, the commission reinterviewed witnesses. Two witnesses testified at trial, and neither of them identified Roberts as the shooter, Cater said. 

“Without (the commission), it would have been difficult or impossible for him to be released,” he said. 

However, the commission has not been popular among prosecutors. They contend that the commission is biased and that defendants should not be allowed so many opportunities to appeal their convictions. Prosecutors often argue that a jury’s verdict should be the final say.

Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill, who has run for state attorney general and lieutenant governor, blasted the commission’s work on a Winston-Salem case in 2019 and urged the legislature to “act now and review the state-funded Innocence Commission and their free-wheeling expenditure of our taxpayer dollars.” 

O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment about the budget or whether he lobbied for the commission to be eliminated. He is past president of the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys, which has lobbied heavily on criminal justice issues. 

In 2021, Cleveland County District Attorney Michael Miller emailed then-House Speaker Tim Moore and said the Innocence Commission had “outlived its usefulness,” according to the News & Observer. Chuck Spahos, legislative liaison for the conference, and O’Neill were copied on the email. 

“It is my belief that they are quickly running out of cases that meet their charter mandate and have begun to actively seek ways to justify their crusade and perhaps even their very existence,” he said in the email.

Prosecutors also lobbied for a law passed in 2023 that applies stricter rules for the admissibility of evidence at hearings in front of a three-judge panel. Critics argue that the rules aren’t needed because, unlike a jury, judges have experience in weighing evidence and say that the measure now places a heavier burden on defendants trying to prove their innocence through the commission process. 

Kimberly Spahos, the conference’s executive director (she is married to Chuck Spahos), said the conference did not request that the Innocence Commission be abolished. She said prosecutors support a defendant’s right to appeal their conviction.

“Multiple public and private pathways currently exist for such review, including the courts, appellate process, and numerous legal advocacy organizations,” she said. 

The late Darryl Hunt would surely disagree.

Innocence’s Beginning

On August 10, 1984, Winston-Salem police found Deborah Sykes, a copy editor for the now-closed afternoon newspaper The Sentinel, on a grassy slope 1 ½ blocks from the newspaper. She had been stabbed 16 times and had been raped. 

A month later, Winston-Salem police would charge the 19-year-old Hunt with her murder. At his first trial, he was convicted of first-degree murder and barely escaped getting the death penalty. The conviction was later overturned, but he was found guilty in a second trial. He spent nearly 19 years in prison before he was exonerated in 2004. DNA testing led to another man, Willard Brown. A Winston-Salem Journal investigation found that police built their case against Hunt on unreliable eyewitnesses and ignored similarities to a February 2, 1985, rape. The suspect in that case was Brown. 

Hunt’s exoneration, along with other high-profile wrongful convictions, pushed then-Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake, a Republican, to form a commission. He tasked that commission with recommending how to prevent future wrongful convictions. One of those suggestions was creating the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. 

The commission got bipartisan support, even from conservative then-Rep. Paul Stam. “The one thing you won’t get out of this commission is a lot of guilty people being set free. It’s just too hard,” he said in a July 26, 2006, Winston-Salem Journal article. 

Legislators said they made it difficult for defendants to win freedom through the commission process in order to win support from prosecutors and law enforcement officials, the Winston-Salem Journal reported in an August 20, 2006, story. 

Chris Mumma, director of the nonprofit N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, said the commission was created to bypass barriers people face when trying to overturn a conviction. Mumma said her organization and innocence projects at universities don’t have the same powers that the Innocence Commission has.

For example, the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence can’t simply order DNA testing or demand access to criminal investigative files; Mumma said she has to seek court orders for those things. Also, defendants cannot bring up innocence claims when they appeal their convictions in state appellate courts immediately after trial. Defendants can file what are known as motions for appropriate relief, which can raise due process and other constitutional issues. However, prosecutors can make legal arguments saying that if a defendant raised certain issues in a previous appeal, they are barred from raising them in a new appeal. 

Mumma said the Innocence Commission has more legal authority to bypass those barriers. 

“There have been a lot of cases where we’ve been told the evidence doesn’t exist. And the commission goes in and does a search or just even sends a letter and said ‘we’re coming in to do a search,’ and suddenly the evidence is found,” Mumma said. 

The proposed elimination of the Innocence Commission is part of a larger agenda, Mumma said. She notes that two bills have been filed—House Bill 307 and Senate Bill 429. Those bills narrow the time frame defendants have to file post-conviction motions for appropriate relief. 

The proposals set a time limit of 120 days after other appeals have been resolved. In some cases, defendants will have to have consent from the elected district attorney before filing a motion for appropriate relief. Critics contend that the bills, along with the proposed elimination of the Innocence Commission, will virtually wipe out ways a wrongfully convicted person can be exonerated. 

Jim Coleman, director of Duke Law School’s Wrongful Conviction Clinic, said this is an effort by prosecutors to paper over deficiencies in the criminal justice system. 

“They’re trying to avoid the hard work necessary to fix the problems,” Coleman said. “Instead, they’re looking for ways to wash their hands of their shoddy work and be able to move on.”

On April 16, Cater had barely heard about the proposed cut to the Innocence Commission. During the day, he heard rumblings as he and his co-counsel, Cecilia Reyna, worked to present their case. In his opening statement, Cater said he told the judges that the commission is a neutral agency dedicated to finding the truth, even if it might uncover evidence of the defendant’s guilt. 

That’s the value of the commission, Cater said. And he worries what might happen to people like Roberts if the commission is abolished. 

“I don’t work for the commission,” he said. “I don’t know the details of what goes on inside of the commission. I can say that the concept of having a commission is crucial.”

Without it, Cater said, people like Roberts who have no easy way of proving their innocence might never be freed.  

Correction: The story has been corrected to note that no one was wounded in the shooting and that witnesses said that Clarence Roberts was in a white car, not an SUV.

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.