Man reaches $25 million settlement after 44 years of wrongful imprisonment

A man who spent 44 years in prison after a North Carolina jury wrongly 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, of the city of Concord, N.C., who acknowledged that “significant errors of judgment and intentional misconduct” by former city employees led to his wrongful conviction and prison sentence.

“We deeply regret the past mistakes that have caused tremendous harm to Mr. Long, his family, friends and our community,” the Concord City Council said in a statement announced the settlement on Tuesday.

“As a result of this conviction, he has long suffered the extraordinary loss of his liberty and a substantial part of his life,” the statement said. “He has wrongly spent 44 years, 3 months and 17 days in prison for a crime that he did not commit. While there are no measures in place to fully return 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 wrongs of the past and to take our responsibility.’

Mr. Long had pushed for 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 Wednesday.

“One of the biggest things for him, even during those 44 years, was to clear not only his name but that of his family, to make it known that he was not involved in the attack that led to his conviction and to to announce this. 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 man. year-old woman earlier that year. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, even though there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, his lawyers said.

Mr. Long’s lawyers said that Concord police were 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 led to an arrest.

The victim identified Mr. Long as her attacker, but only after police brought her into a courtroom wearing a wig and glasses to watch Mr. Long accused of trespassing in a city park, according to court documents, a lawsuit which, according to his lawyers, was highly suggestive.

Mr. Long, who is black, has a dark complexion, and the victim, who was white, had previously described her attacker as a “black man with yellow or very light skin,” Mr. Long’s lawyers said.

Police hid evidence from Mr. Long’s lawyers that would have undermined the identification in court, according to a lawsuit 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. matches Mr. Long’s, the lawsuit said.

Before the trial, the Cabarrus County sheriff, Concord police chief and some of his officers also personally vetted jurors to rule out “undesirables,” according to Mr. Long’s lawsuit. As a result, there were only four black people in the pool of 99 potential jurors that Mr. Long’s trial team reviewed, the lawsuit said. Nobody was sitting.

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 the police, the police empaneled a jury to ensure his conviction and when the evidence showed they had the wrong person they simply lied about it or made him disappear,” Mr Long said Lau.

In August 2020, days after a federal appeals court ruled that Mr. Long’s due process rights had been violated during his trial, a judge threw out Mr. Long’s conviction on charges of rape and burglary.

Mr. Long, who had spent more than 40 years trying to prove his innocence, was released from the Albemarle Correctional Institution in New London, NC.

In December 2020, Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, decided pardoned Mr. Long. 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 met and married while in prison, Mr. Lau said.

The two now plan 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 spent with his parents, who died while he was in prison.

“He wanted to repair what had been done to him and restore the legacy that had been damaged and ripped from the family,” she said. The settlement, she added, “is a critical step toward healing and a start to restoring the name.”