Freed after 44 years, Ronnie Long copes with an alien world
The toll of losing 44 years of his life surfaces when Ronnie Long is asked to describe his first days of freedom.
“You ever seen a dog,” Long begins in a voice cured by decades of smoke from prison cigarettes, sounding like he spent years preparing for a question that he knew would one day come, “and you tie him up in your backyard and keep him on that chain for about a week or two.”
“And then once you turn him loose, he take off,” Long says, his voice rising. “I mean, he gone. The dog is rippin’ and running everywhere.
“That’s the elation I felt to be out of bondage,” he says.
Long’s words come faster now, as do glimpses of his younger self, the side of him that came and went during the 44 years, three months and 17 days he spent behind the walls of North Carolina prisons for a crime he says he never committed. After decades of appeals, a federal judge in Greensboro threw out Long’s 1976 conviction last month.
Back when he was young, before his conviction in the rape of one of the most prominent white women in his hometown of Concord, 20-year-old “Peanut” Long thought he was “the baddest man God ever blew breath in,” the soon-to-be 65-year-old Long says, laughing.
People told him he looked like Marvin Gaye. But Long modeled himself after John Shaft, the break-through Black detective hero of early 1970s cinema, right down to the walk, the attitude and the black leather coat Long insisted on wearing even in 100-degree heat.
Back then, Long drove a 1969 black-on-black Cadillac El Dorado, and every day was an open road. Now, Long appears eager to get back behind the wheel of his own life, accelerating into every remaining curve.
“I want to rip and run,” he says. “I want to smell the air. I want to go in the woods. I want — you understand what I’m saying — to go down to Baskin-Robbins. I ain’t gone there yet, but I’m going. Baskin-Robbins got some bubblegum ice cream and everything, man. They tell me those people got over a hundred flavors.
“That’s what I’m ... that’s the elation I feel, man, you understand? To be able to get up in the morning. Eat what you want to eat. ... You ain’t got to go down to the chow hall no more. Ain’t no standing in line no more. No ‘Stop the talking!’ No more ‘I’m giving you a direct order.’ No more, ‘I’ll write you up if you say this or you don’t do that.’
“All that is behind me now.”
Yet, Long’s present and future will be determined by how well a 64-year-old man in questionable health, with a new wife and no permanent address adapts to an alien world.
Charlotte attorney Sonya Pfeiffer says Long, as with other released prisoners, faces a sobering and uncertain path.
“We ruined them,” she says. “How do we expect anyone to re-enter?”
‘Frozen in time’
Sometime in the coming weeks, Long’s name will be officially added to the National Register of Exonerations. The total time he spent in prison before his conviction was overturned places him third on the list of longest sentences ever served by individuals for crimes they did not commit.
For every year the average exonoree spent in prison, Long lost nearly five.
Long will supplant Charles Finch, a Wilson County man sent to Death Row for murder before his conviction was overturned in 2019, giving North Carolina the dubious distinction of having two of the top five longest-serving names on the exonerations list.
Pfeiffer, who is representing Finch in his lawsuit against his home county and two State Bureau of Investigation employees, says the damage long-term incarceration inflicts on the wrongfully accused is incalculable. Any joy the prisoner feels in the return to freedom, she says, can be as ephemeral as an ice cream high, 100 flavors or not.
“The public sees this moment of joy when that person is released from custody. But we don’t recognize how quickly that drops. It does not fade. It just drops because you’re suddenly confronted by an unfamiliar world,” says Pfeiffer, part of Finch’s defense team that includes her attorney/husband, David Rudolf.
“In prison, you’re frozen in time. You’re not evolving as society is evolving. That evolution is not an overnight change, and suddenly we’re asking them to adapt overnight to a world they do not recognize.”
For the time being, Long appears to be living in a type of purgatory, lodged between his old life and the new. He is less than two weeks into the day-to-day logistics of his marriage to Ashleigh Long, a former UNC Charlotte student and prisoner advocate whom Long met in 2013 and married a year later.
Long left the communal living of Albemarle Correctional Institution for the communal living of a two-story ranch house with dirty yellow vinyl siding in east Durham that Ashleigh temporarily shares with two male friends.
He is still learning to use his new cellphone, doesn’t know how to fully operate his wife’s television, and after decades in a controlled prison environment, finds to his surprise that when he steps outside to smoke a Newport, “the baddest man God ever blew breath into” is afraid of the dark.
Meanwhile, his desire to explore the roads he once saw only through the windows of a penitentiary bus has been put on hold: Long can’t get a license because the DMV has shut down road tests during the pandemic.
He tried to open a checking account on Friday at his wife’s bank but was refused for lack of adequate identification, Ashleigh Long says.
More disturbingly, his legal status appears to be a matter of significant confusion.
Citing a record of government corruption, from jury tampering to lost or withheld evidence to Concord police detectives lying on the witness stand, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a lower court to reopen Long’s case. Long’s conviction was quickly vacated by U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles. The Cabarrus County District Attorney’s Office already has announced that it will not seek a new trial.
Yet on Thursday, when the Longs were in Winston-Salem, two Durham County sheriff’s deputies visited their home to tell one of Ashleigh’s roommates that Long had to register as a sex offender.
It took a phone call from Long’s attorney, Duke University law professor Jamie Lau, to convince the sheriff’s office that Long’s rape conviction had been thrown out, meaning he did not have to register.
Pardon from Gov. Cooper?
Long is still waiting to hear whether Gov. Roy Cooper will pardon him. Until he gets that, Long cannot receive up to $750,000 in compensation over the next 15 years, which he is eligible for under state law.
A lawsuit by Long over his conviction and incarceration appears almost certain. He and his wife will soon begin poring over a list of potential attorneys prepared for them by the exonoree-advocacy nonprofit, After Innocence, which is also arranging other types of day-to-day assistance Long now needs.
“Ronnie Long suffered a unique tragedy — being put in prison for something he didn’t do. You don’t have to be a Ph.D. in psychology to see how that would traumatize you,” says the group’s director, Jon Eldan.
Eldan says exonerated inmates like Long often experience the euphoria of their freedom. But there’s more going on.
“In many instances over months and years, we see a variety of feelings, including anger, ” he says, “which makes sense for people who were put in prison for something they didn’t do.”
Speaking of anger, Ashleigh Long has no qualms expressing hers.
“God shows mercy, but we’re not going to. We’re going for the jugular. I want Ronnie to go for the jugular,” the 35-year-old waitress says. “Forty-four years. Forty-four damn years ... He should bankrupt the state.”
For his part, Long says he “ain’t got time to be sitting around with my lip stuck out about what they did to me 44 years ago.”
He says he is more concerned about arranging for abdominal surgery that is long overdue. As is a trip to the dentist. During one of his first restaurant meals as a free man, Long says he lost a tooth.
But asked if he harbors anger, Long makes it clear he still holds his home county’s police, prosecutors and judges responsible for all he has lost.
“I lost people that were important to me,” he begins. “I lost opportunity.”
“I lost the privilege given every man born in the United States to grow and progress, to expand.”
“They took my youth. They took my adulthood, and my (old) age,” he says. “They know they were wrong. They know they took my life ... but ain’t nobody apologized.”
“Couldn’t you walk up to a man and tell him, ‘Yo, man. we made a mistake. I apologize for what happened to you.’?
“Hell, I can’t get that. I can’t get that.”
Asked if he’ll ever return full-time to Concord, Long snorts: “If you take Ronnie Long back to Concord it’ll be to bury him.
“Yeah, bury me beside my mother and father.”
Where’s home?
On the night of Long’s release from prison, more than 200 people gathered at his parents’ former home in “The Bottom,” the traditional Black community of Concord.
To the disappointment of the crowd, Long went to Durham instead. Ashleigh Long says her husband doesn’t yet feel safe spending the night in his hometown.
Lynda Smith, Long’s oldest sister and one of the eight children raised by Ike and Elizabeth Long, says she understands her brother’s decision to keep his visits home short.
“They railroaded him, and I think some are not liking that’s he out,” Smith said last week. “Now, there are a lot of nice people here. Everybody is not mean. But there are some mean people. And there are a lot of people with money who don’t like change.”
Aaron “Chuck” Pharr, perhaps Long’s oldest friend, says white Concord did not know what to make of Long even when he was a kid.
“Ronnie would not yes sir and no sir you. He just kind of spoke his mind,” Pharr says. “That was unacceptable to the white police of that time. They thought Ronnie had what they said was a case of ‘too much mouth.’ A couple of police told him, ‘You keep running your mouth and you’re never going to get a job at Cannon Mills.”
In 1976, the company town was shaken by the rape of the widow of one of the mill’s top executives, a 54-year-old with strong ties to the Cannon family.
The victim picked Long out of a police lineup, even though he bore little resemblance to her original description of her attacker. Long wore his John Shaft leather coat in the police lineup. The woman said her attacker had worn a leather coat, too.
His parents spent the rest of their lives fighting to get their son’s conviction overturned. Long called his mother from prison regularly.
Despite the discovery through the years of a growing indication that Long had not received a fair trial, his sentence dragged on.
Ike Long died in 2010. Elizabeth Long celebrated her 89th birthday on May 27. In her final weeks, she began asking if her son had finally come home.
“Not yet, mom,” Smith would tell her. “But he’ll be here. Just hold on.”
On July 10, Ronnie Long decided his mother had waited long enough. According to Smith, Long told her that he prayed for God to let his mother “take her rest.”
Elizabeth Long died the next morning, little more than six weeks before the release of her son.
As Long tries to blend his new family with the old, all sides acknowledge that there is tension around his marriage to Ashleigh, who first wrote to Long in July 2013 after reading about his case. A year and a month later, they were married.
“They don’t know each other, I guess they’re getting to know each other now,” Smith says.
She elaborates.
“I worry about him winding up with the wrong people,” Smith says. “He was locked up for 44 years. He don’t know stuff. People are so tricky. I hope he’s got people around to help him make the right decisions. He thinks he’s smart. You can’t tell him he don’t know something. But so much stuff has changed.”
Pharr, who fought for his friend’s freedom through almost all of his confinement, says Long asked him to be a witness at the wedding. Pharr declined, feeling that his friend was making a mistake.
Last week, Long and Pharr talked at Pharr’s home in Concord. “I said to him, ‘Ronnie, are you absolutely sure about your relationship with Ashleigh?’
“He was just sitting there and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’”
Pharr continues: “You know, Ashleigh once told me, ‘A white woman put him in there. A white woman can get him out.’
“I thought she was kidding. Now I don’t think she was.”
‘George Floyd is not the first’
Back in Durham, Ashleigh Long acknowledges the doubts her husband’s family holds about her and the marriage. She hopes they’ll give the relationship some time.
In her first letter to Long in July 2013, Ashleigh Ward said she had little money, didn’t know a lot of people, but felt God was calling her to help him.
“I’m not just some hopeful, naive girl thinking this will be easy, that people won’t try to stop it from happening,” she wrote. “I’ve experienced a lot in my life. I’m far from naive, and I’m intelligent. I’d almost say that I am the nightmare of the American Criminal Justice System.”
Seven years later, Long was released on Ashleigh’s 35th birthday.
For now she’s happy to have Long home, happy to make sure he eats healthy food, happy to run his errands, happy to serve as his technology coach, appointment secretary, grocery consultant, cultural adviser, security detail and TV guide.
The blunt-speaking activist, who once called Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein “punk b------” in a Tweet storm because they would not intercede on Long’s behalf, sounds almost maternal toward her new live-in spouse. Despite the difference in age and race, she calls him her twin.
“Ronnie is not going to work a day or break a sweat for the rest of his life. From now on it’s all about what he wants to do, how he wants to do it and when he wants to do it,” she said in an earlier phone interview.
“It’s a rough line to walk. I don’t want to be a nagging wife. I just tell Ronnie that other people’s excitement about his case is not his obligation, that he shouldn’t be putting his own needs aside just to please them.”
Out in the backyard, Long appears in need of a nap. On several occasions he dozes off mid-answer, including one where he said he is free today only because “God said enough is enough.”
He awakens without missing a beat.
“Never lose hope, never give up on your dreams,” Long says as his eyes reopen. “Whatever you’re striving for. Whatever it is that you are doing to try and better yourself. ... Have faith in something (even) if you don’t have faith in nobody but yourself.”
In whatever time he has remaining, Long says he wants to help free other prisoners who already have earned their freedom. The walls of his Stanly County prison did not block his view of the current protests over institutional violence and discrimination toward Black people, a movement that may have contributed to his own freedom.
“Black men been having knees on their necks ever since they set foot in the Western Hemisphere,” he says. “George Floyd ain’t the first. He ain’t the second. He ain’t the third. He ain’t the last.”
That morning, Long had stayed up til 2 a.m. watching the Denzel Washington film “Malcolm X,” the story of another man transformed by his stay in prison.
With the original version of Shaft about to celebrate its 50th anniversary, Long acknowledges he might need more contemporary role models. Washington might do, he says. Long doesn’t seem to realize that Washington starred in the movie 28 years ago, and that he and the actor soon will be the same age.
For now he’s relying on his wife, 30 years his younger, as the tour guide for his new life.
“I already know I’m a dinosaur from another world,” Long says as he and Ashleigh get ready for a trip to a nearby grocery. “So what’s not the best way to do that (than) with somebody who knows where they going and what they doing. So, it’s Ashleigh — whatever she say.”
He shares one of his recent cultural discoveries, part of what he describes as “the process” to bring him more up to date.
“She always throwing this in my face ... ‘happy wife, happy life,’” Long says. “I said, ‘OK then. Whatever you tell me to do, that’s what we’re going to do.’”
Which sounds good. But a laughing Long says it also raises a conundrum: “How you gonna tell John Shaft, ‘Happy wife, happy life?’”
Casey Toth contributed to this story.
This story was originally published September 8, 2020 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Freed after 44 years, Ronnie Long copes with an alien world."
