Man Reaches $25 Million Settlement After 44 Years of Wrongful Imprisonment
A man who spent 44 years in prison after a jury in North Carolina wrongfully convicted him of raping a woman in 1976 has settled a lawsuit against state and local law enforcement officials for $25 million.
The settlement included a public apology to the man, Ronnie Long, 68, from the city of Concord, N.C., which acknowledged that “significant errors in judgment and willful misconduct” by previous city employees led to his wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
“We are deeply remorseful for the past wrongs that caused tremendous harm to Mr. Long, his family, friends and our community,” the Concord City Council said in a statement announcing the settlement on Tuesday.
“Mr. Long suffered the extraordinary loss of his freedom and a substantial portion of his life because of this conviction,” the statement said. “He wrongly served 44 years, 3 months and 17 days in prison for a crime he did not commit. While there are no measures to fully restore to Mr. Long and his family all that was taken from them, through this agreement we are doing everything in our power to right the past wrongs and take responsibility.”
Mr. Long had insisted on the public apology, along with the monetary settlement, which includes $22 million from the city and $3 million from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, one of his lawyers, Jamie T. Lau, said on Wednesday.
“One of the biggest things for him, even through those 44 years, was to clear not only his name, but his family’s name, to make it known that he was not involved in the assault that led to his conviction and to make it known that he came from a good, working-class family in Concord,” said Mr. Lau, a supervising attorney at the Duke Law School Wrongful Convictions Clinic, which represented Mr. Long.
Mr. Long was a 21-year-old cement mason with a 2-year-old son when he was convicted on Oct. 1, 1976, of breaking into a home in Concord, about 25 miles northeast of Charlotte, and raping a 54-year-old woman earlier that year. He was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences even though no physical evidence linked him to the crime, his lawyers said.
Mr. Long’s lawyers said the Concord police had been under pressure to close the case in part because the victim’s late husband had been an executive at a local textile company, Cannon Mills, which had offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.
The victim had identified Mr. Long as her attacker, but only after the police brought her into a courtroom in a wig and glasses to watch as Mr. Long faced a bogus charge of trespassing in a city park, according to court documents, a process that his lawyers said was highly suggestive.
Mr. Long, who is Black, has dark skin, and the victim, who was white, had previously described her attacker as a “yellow- or really light-skinned Black male,” Mr. Long’s lawyers said.
The police hid evidence from Mr. Long’s trial lawyers that would have undercut the courtroom identification, according to a lawsuit that Mr. Long filed against the city in 2021. That evidence included hair and more than 40 fingerprints found at the crime scene that did not match Mr. Long’s, the lawsuit said.
Before the trial, the Cabarrus County sheriff, the Concord police chief and some of his officers also personally vetted the jury rolls to weed out “undesirables,” according to Mr. Long’s lawsuit. As a result, there were only four Black people in the pool of 99 prospective jurors that Mr. Long’s trial team reviewed, the lawsuit said. None were seated.
Three members of the all-white jury worked for Cannon Mills, and a fourth was married to a Cannon Mills employee, Mr. Long’s lawsuit said.
Mr. Long “was targeted by police, the police manufactured a jury pool to ensure his conviction and, when the evidence indicated they had the wrong person, they just lied about it or made it disappear,” Mr. Lau said.
In August 2020, days after a federal appeals court ruled that Mr. Long’s due process rights had been violated at his trial, a judge dismissed Mr. Long’s conviction on rape and burglary charges.
Mr. Long, who had spent more than 40 years trying to prove his innocence, was released from the Albemarle Correctional Institution in New London, N.C.
In December 2020, Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, granted Mr. Long a pardon. The pardon qualified Mr. Long to receive $750,000 from the state, which he used to buy a house with his wife, Ashley Long, whom he had met and married while in prison, Mr. Lau said.
The two are now planning to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary, said Sonya Pfeiffer, one of Mr. Long’s lawyers. While the settlement will help them financially, “what it doesn’t give him is any of the life he lost,” Ms. Pfeiffer said, including time with his parents, who died while he was in prison.
“He wanted to repair what had been done to him and repair that legacy that had been damaged and ripped from the family,” she said. The settlement, she added, “is a critical step to healing and a start to restoring the name.”