By VICTORIA A. IFATUSIN, Asheville Watchdog
Six Buncombe men have been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned over the past two decades, spending a total of 46 years behind bars and costing the county and state $7,687,841 in compensation payments.
But unlike a rising number of cities and counties nationwide that have instituted Conviction Integrity Units, Buncombe has resisted establishing a formal system to exonerate people who are wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence.
Nearly half of the CIUs have been launched in the past five years, as concerns about long standing issues in the criminal justice system, especially arrests and convictions of Black people, have risen.
Of 153 people exonerated nationwide in 2023, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, 93 of them — 61 percent — are Black.
All six of the exonerated men in Buncombe County are Black.
Five of them were convicted in a 2000 home invasion murder in Fairview and served three to 12 years each in prison, but their DNA was never found at the crime scene.
Buncombe District Attorney Todd Williams first won election in 2014 accusing his predecessor of tarnishing the public image of the office with the wrongful murder prosecutions. But Williams — who until December served as an alternate commissioner on the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, the first state innocence commission in the country — has resisted creating a conviction integrity unit for Buncombe, and now says one is unnecessary.
Attorneys who work on wrongful convictions disagree and said Buncombe’s track record of exonerations and corruption at the highest level – former Sheriff Bobby Lee Medford went to federal prison – demonstrate the need for a conviction integrity unit.
“It’s important, really, in any county to have a unit in the district attorney’s office that’s available and willing and able to look at convictions and determine whether a person was wrongfully or rightfully convicted,” said Robert Udashen of Asheville, a former defense attorney whose work in Dallas led to the exonerations of six people.
Prosecutors in at least 100 counties nationwide have dedicated conviction integrity units to identify and remedy false convictions. Those units have been involved in 40 percent of exonerations in the past 10 years.
Chris Mumma, executive director of the Durham-based nonprofit North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, said research estimates that one to five percent of inmates convicted of felonies are innocent, which would be 7 to 35 of the 700 people currently imprisoned from Buncombe County.
“If there’s seven people who are in prison for something they didn’t do under the most conservative estimates, I think that’s still worth looking [at],” she said.
DA: Conviction integrity unit ‘not necessary’
Conviction integrity units (CIUs) are typically housed in prosecutors’ offices and have the power to subpoena witnesses and documents and test physical evidence. CIUs have helped exonerate dozens of people in 19 states.
No county in North Carolina has one, and, according to Williams, Buncombe is unlikely to be the first. The District Attorney’s Office handles thousands of cases each week and “is the least well-funded and staffed metro DA’s Office in the state,” Williams told The Watchdog in an email.
Williams said that despite his requests to the state legislature, his office has been denied funding for additional prosecutors for the past 20 years. Already overburdened with the workload, the office cannot devote staff to a CIU, he said, and focuses on cases before they go to trial to prevent wrongful convictions.
“We work diligently to conduct a careful vetting pre-trial of each case to ensure compliance with the law and the constitutional rights of the defendant,” Williams said.
Defendants who claim new evidence proving their innocence after a conviction can file a motion. Williams said his office receives about 10 such motions a year — not enough to justify a CIU.
“If there is a credible claim supported by evidence and law that a conviction was obtained due to an error of any kind, we will work to correct the issue case by case and seek justice before the court,” Williams said. “A conviction integrity unit is not necessary at this time.”
Mumma said a CIU in Buncombe County “would be a cooperative effort between prosecution and defense to ensure justice was served in cases that were investigated and prosecuted during times when we did not have the knowledge we now have about science, best investigative practices, and fallibility in the system for human error.”
“Citizens need to see that their prosecutors care about justice, not just convictions,” Mumma said.
For 12 years in Buncombe ending in 2006, justice was administered by a sheriff, Bobby Lee Medford, who later went to federal prison on corruption charges related to illegal gambling and kickbacks in Buncombe County. Medford and his deputies arrested and interrogated the five who were ultimately cleared in the Fairview murder case.
Jamie Lau, who helped investigate the Fairview defendants while at the state-run North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, said Buncombe could have more than 10 innocence claims a year with a conviction integrity unit.
“The volume of cases you don’t know because those are just the 10 people succeeding and finding someone to help them,” said Lau, now a supervising attorney of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke University School of Law. “Otherwise, there may be more people writing to the DA’s office if they knew such a thing existed.”
Williams also said that “North Carolina does not provide a means for prosecutors to initiate post-conviction proceedings,” even if funding existed, and that may explain why no county has a CIU.
Mumma called Williams’ interpretation “another cop-out.”
“The statutes limit when a defendant may bring a post-conviction motion, but nothing in the law says the prosecution cannot initiate a post-conviction motion,” she said. “It’s absurd to say the minister of justice can’t initiate proceedings to correct injustice.”
Buncombe needs CIU, former defense attorney says
Udashen, the former defense attorney in Dallas, worked with the conviction integrity unit there on four exonerations.
“That whole experience of getting people out of prison that never should’ve been there in the first place… was one of the most rewarding things I did,” said Udashen, whose representation of Candy Montgomery, a Texas housewife acquitted of murdering her lover’s wife with an ax in 1980, was portrayed in the 2023 Max series Love and Death.
With six known exonerations already, “I think that shows people in Buncombe County can be wrongfully convicted,” Udashen said.
Udashen helped exonerate Stephen Phillips, a Dallas man who was wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting multiple women. Udashen, along with the Innocence Project, requested DNA testing that proved Phillips did not commit the crimes.
Udashen said Buncombe needs a CIU separate from other prosecutors.
“You need someone whose only job it is to review the conviction and not someone who’s going to be in court tomorrow trying a case and trying to get ready for trial and didn’t really have time to go back and look at an old conviction,” he said.
Udashen said about three years ago he twice talked to Williams, advocating for him to establish a CIU.
Williams said “we don’t really need it,” Udashen said, adding that the district attorney also said, “I don’t think I can get the money from the county commissioners to hire effective prosecutors to be in charge of it.”
Udashen said he offered to help secure resources through funding such as grants. Mumma said she has also encouraged Williams to create a CIU and that her center could provide the manpower to screen cases and partner on a federal grant.
Innocence projects stretched
Inmates who believe they were wrongfully convicted have other options besides the District Attorney’s Office.
Duke and Wake Forest universities operate innocence projects with law students. The North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence represents indigent inmates on credible claims supported by new evidence.
North Carolina was the first state to create an Innocence Inquiry Commission in 2007. In the 17 years since, the commission has reviewed more than 3,600 innocence claims, but only 15 people have been exonerated.
Lau of Duke said resources for wrongful convictions are limited.
“There are not enough organizations to handle all the cases in North Carolina,” he said. “Three thinly staffed organizations and a state agency that I think has six, maybe seven employees are insufficient to investigate that volume of potential cases of wrongful conviction.”
Mumma said the Innocence Inquiry Commission staff “is not very experienced in criminal justice.”
“A lot of them don’t have any experience as prosecutors or defense attorneys,” she said.
Udashen said, as he understands, the Innocence Inquiry Commission “is really, really slow. It takes forever for them to investigate things, so cases just go there to die.”
Laura Pierro, the commission’s executive director and a former immigration judge, joined the commission April 1 and has 20 years experience as a prosecutor in New Jersey. She said in an email to The Watchdog that “the commission’s mission is to swiftly, impartially, and competently assess, investigate and adjudicate claims of actual innocence and we enjoy a wonderful and collaborative relationship with the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys as well as our local innocence projects.”
Claims to the Innocence Inquiry Commission go through several stages of review and investigation and ultimately a hearing before judges. Most are dismissed before they reach the final stages.
Mumma said the “process is broken” partly because of the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys, a state agency run by state DAs that assists district attorneys “in their pursuit of justice.”
The conference “has pushed for legislative changes to the commission that’s weakened its abilities to effectively exonerate people,” Mumma said, such as opposing changes that would make it easier to access old records and files for people filing innocence claims.
The conference’s executive committee and the executive director “tells district attorneys what to do and what not to do,” she said. “I know for a fact that they discourage district attorneys, regardless of what the evidence shows, they discourage them from cooperating with innocence cases and encourage them to litigate them to the final second.”
The executive director of the conference, Kimberly Overton Spahos, said in an email to The Watchdog that as ministers of justice, district attorneys are “required not merely to convict or even to uphold a conviction.”
The state’s Bar Rules of Professional Conduct “require a prosecutor to promptly disclose new, credible evidence or information creating a likelihood that a convicted defendant did not commit an offense for which the defendant was convicted,” she said.
“Any suggestion by anyone that the Executive Committee or the Conference Director advises any District Attorney to the contrary is patently false,” Spahos said.
She said research from the National Center for State Courts indicates that North Carolina district attorney offices “need an additional 138 prosecutors and 167 legal assistants to administer justice.”
“There has never been state funding to support conviction integrity units,” Spahos said.
Profile of the wrongfully committed: Black and male
The six Buncombe exonerations include the five from the Fairview home invasion, and another man who was erroneously convicted of check forgery in 2010.
Larry Williams Jr. was just 16 and denied any involvement in the Fairview murder, but deputies working for Buncombe Sheriff Medford told him they had evidence implicating him and that he would go to prison for life.
Williams, Kenneth Kagonyera, Damien Mills, and Robert Wilcoxson pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and Teddy Isbell pleaded guilty to accessory to murder. Four of the men were 21 or younger at the time of the crime.
DNA results from bandanas and gloves used in the murder excluded all five men, but that evidence was withheld from their attorneys and them. No physical or forensic evidence tied the men to the crime scene.
Medford later testified in civil cases over the wrongful convictions and was unapologetic about applying pressure to the defendants to get them to plead guilty.
“If this guy, he didn’t do it and, he [an interrogator] said, ‘If you’re going to plea, we’re going to give you two years, but if you don’t plea, we’re going to give you 20 years,’ hell, they’re going to jump at the two years, and not going to take a chance on a jury trial,” Medford testified.
Kagonyera and Wilcoxson were released in 2011 after an investigation by the Innocence Inquiry Commission. Isbell, Williams, and Mills had already completed their sentences; Todd Williams ordered an investigation and advocated for vacating their convictions. Four of the men – Kagonyera, Isbell, Williams, and Mills – were pardoned by Gov. Roy Cooper in 2020.
In the other wrongful conviction case, Shelton Horace was falsely convicted of forging checks. He served two years in prison.
All six of the exonerated men are Black. Since 1989, 53 percent of exonerees have been Black, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. In North Carolina 77 percent have been Black.
Lau of Duke University said that “Black males are five times more likely to be wrongfully convicted for murder and seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of sexual assault.”
“That’s not to say that the system doesn’t wrongfully incarcerate white people – it certainly does,” he said. “But I think there is a racial element that makes the wrongful convictions of people of color more prominent.”
Mumma said CIUs would go a long way toward more quickly righting injustices and freeing people imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit.
“The public cannot have confidence in its justice system if the innocent are not protected,” Mumma said. “And if district attorneys don’t care about protecting the innocent, they should not be trusted either.”
(Editor’s note: Robert Udashen occasionally volunteers for The Watchdog, helping with public events. In addition, in an update to this story, we’ve added specific information about the corruption conviction of former Buncombe Sheriff Bobby Lee Medford to make clear his imprisonment was not related to the arrests of the five men who were ultimately cleared in the Fairview murder case.)
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Victoria A. Ifatusin joined us through a 12-month fellowship as part of the prestigious Scripps Howard Fund’s Roy W. Howard Fellowship program. You can reach her via email at [email protected]. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service please visit avlwatchdog.org/donate.
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Previously Published on avlwatchdog.org
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