A North Carolina man is free after spending more than four decades in prison for a crime he did not commit.
Ronnie Long’s fight for freedom ended after he walked out of Albemarle Correctional Institute on Thursday, reported WBTV.
He was released three days after the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned a lower court and ruled the conviction violated Long’s right to due process. The appeals court determined Long was a victim of “a troubling and striking pattern of deliberate police suppression of material evidence.”
Long had been in prison for 44 years. Jamie Lau, a lawyer from the Duke Innocence Project who is representing Long, believes racial tension led to his client’s imprisonment.
“The cards were heavily stacked against him and a large part of that was the racial dynamics in North Carolina in the South, and in particular Concord, North Carolina, in 1976,” Lau told CNN.
In 1976, a white woman claimed a Black man broke into her Concord home, raped her and ran away.
Two weeks later, police officers took the victim to a courthouse and allowed her to sit in hearings for other cases to see if she recognized anyone.
She selected Long, who was there for a charge of trespassing in a park behind his home, and he would later he picked up charged with rape and burglary.
The evidence to support the charges was shaky, at best. Long’s defense did not know about several pieces of key evidence, including a rape kit performed on the victim. Additionally, none of the DNA evidence collected by authorities matched Long.
At trial the victim described her attacker as a “light-skinned” or “yellow” Black man, not “a real Black man,” a description that does not fit Long. However, a leather jacket worn by Long looked like one reportedly worn by the rapist.
“It was a ubiquitous piece of clothing for Black males at the time, in part because the movie ‘Shaft’ had come out a few years prior,” Lau told “48 Hours” last week.
The state tested at least a dozen pieces of evidence but did not reveal their findings to the defense.
“Not only did they hide evidence, but then they took the stand while under oath and lied about the evidence,” Lau said.
The jury and all the prosecution’s witnesses were white and everyone who spoke for the defense was Black. During the trial, alibi witnesses told the court they were around Long at the time of the attack, but their testimony did no good.
Long was convicted and given two life sentences. He was 20 years old.
“So now you tell me, you got a young Black man in 1976 in front of a white jury … for a sexual assault of a rich, wealthy, white female. I mean, what kind of justice is that?” Long told “48 Hours.”
Despite the revelation of suppressed evidence, the state continued to fight to uphold the conviction. In May, the North Carolina attorney general’s office argued in court the additional information wouldn’t have led to a different outcome. The state finally relented after the appeals court decision and called for Long’s release.
Long wants to spend time with his family and wife Ashleigh, whom he married in 2014. He also wants to visit his parents’ graves.
“I know my mother and father died with a broken heart. I’m gonna tell them now when I visit the gravesite, ‘Your son is clear.'”
Long’s legal team plans to request a pardon of innocence from Gov. Roy Cooper so he can receive funds from a program that compensates wrongfully convicted people.
