A Black man, wearing a dark three-piece suit, red tie and a hat, walked out of prison in North Carolina, last Thursday, wheeling his few belongings behind him. "It's been a long road, but it's over now!" said Ronnie Long, shortly after his release, as he raised his hands to his supporters and threw his arms around his loved ones, in a show of perseverance through a long battle of proving innocence against a deplorable act of judicial misconduct.
"To be able to walk out of them gates without being supervised, it was breathtaking," Long told the reporters.
Long, now 64, was sentenced to 80 years in prison for rape and burglary in the May of 1976 after he was accused of breaking into a home in Concord, North Carolina and raping a 54-year-old White woman, Sarah Bost.
Although there was no physical evidence tying Long to the crime, he was convicted by an all-White jury, and given an 80-year sentence. "I feel as though the criminal justice system here in this state failed me," Long said.
It was only after spending nearly 30 years in prison when Long learned that the Concord police investigators had tested more than a dozen pieces of evidence, and had hidden the results. That evidence, his lawyer, Jamie Lau described, in an interview last month, supported Long's innocence.
But attorneys for the state, however, had kept on arguing that none of this would have changed the original verdict, and as a result Long remained in prison, despite growing protests and demands for his release.
Until last week, when the 4th Circuit US Court of Appeals finally ruled 44 years later that Long's rights had been violated by "a troubling and striking pattern of deliberate police suppression of material evidence."
That evidence, which included semen samples and fingerprints from the crime scene that did not match Long, was deliberately withheld by law enforcement, Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote in the filing.
"Because of the deceit that occurred at trial, Ronnie and his counsel at the time didn't have the benefit of that evidence to present to the jury," Lau said. "So he's been wrongly incarcerated for 44 years."
The North Carolina Attorney General's office decided to no longer fight the case, and asked for Long's release.
When Lau, working with the Duke University Law School's Wrongful Convictions Clinic, first informed the news to Long, the Black man couldn't quite believe that he was really going home.
"'You serious?'" Long recalled saying. "The state can't go back on their word? They gonna stick to what they say?"
The withholding of evidence meant that Long was already facing an unfair trial, Lau said. But the racial dynamics at the time also worked against him.
After dismissal of charges, Long now wants to spend time with his family, including his wife, AshLeigh, whom he married in 2014, and visit the graves of his parents. He said, "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.'"
Next step for Long and his attorneys is to seek a pardon of innocence, so that he can collect money from a state fund that gives money to the wrongfully-convicted.
