‘Ronnie Long must be free.’ New hearing ordered for man who has spent 44 years in prison
After 44 years in prison for a rape he says he never committed, Ronnie Long’s hopes for freedom gained significant momentum when a federal appeals court ordered a new hearing that could lead to his acquittal or a new trial.
The Monday ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sends the 1976 rape case back to the federal courts in North Carolina to reconsider Long’s request to have his conviction reviewed and potentially thrown out. The decision comes as the country — and Long’s home state — grapples with a renewed debate over how Black men and women are treated by police and the courts.
Nine judges voted in favor of the decision; six opposed it. Two of North Carolina’s members, including Judge Albert Diaz of Charlotte, joined the majority. Judge Allison Rushing of Asheville, a 2019 appointment by President Donald Trump, voted no.
In her opinion for the majority, Judge Stephanie Thacker hammered North Carolina for continuing to defend Long’s conviction despite clear evidence that its own investigators withheld evidence that may have cleared him at his 1976 trial. Instead, Long got 80 years.
Judge James Wynn, who like Long grew up Black in a small N.C. town, picked up the thread in his concurring opinion.
“That evidence has now trickled out, revealing the truth that Mr. Long has declared for decades: he should not have been found guilty,” Wynn wrote.
Long’s attorneys cheered the ruling, which they say adds urgency to their motion filed Monday in state court to have the 64-year-old released from Albemarle Correctional Institute due to concerns about COVID-19.
Defense attorney and Duke law professor Jamie Lau said an ongoing outbreak of the disease within the Stanly County prison has sickened more than 150 inmates and killed three.
“The Fourth Circuit has now affirmed what we have said all along — that Mr. Long’s constitutional rights at trial were repeatedly violated by dishonest police officers and the suppression of evidence. No reasonable juror would ever convict Long knowing these facts, and it is time for the State of North Carolina to set him free,” Lau told the Observer in an email.
“Our efforts in state court take on even more significance now, as Mr. Long’s life is potentially at stake due to the global pandemic ... If North Carolina cares about fairness and accuracy in its criminal justice system, Ronnie Long must be free.”
Long’s defense file reads like a sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird.” As a 20-year-old Black man living in Concord, Long was accused of an unthinkable crime in the small-town South: the rape of a white woman.
In Long’s hometown, the attack was considered even more heinous — and the urgency to find the culprit even more pronounced — because the 54-year-old victim was the widow of a former executive at Cannon Mills, the town’s biggest employer.
The victim told police she had been dragged to the stairwell of her home, where the rape occurred. After her attacker fled when her telephone rang, she ran naked to a neighbor’s home.
The victim later identified Long as her assailant while wearing a disguise as she sat in the second row of a Cabarrus County courtroom. She told police she recognized Long’s voice as he discussed an unrelated matter with a judge. She later described his voice as “a black voice.” Her descriptions of her attacker at the time of the rape and later at trial varied significantly, court records show.
In the decades since, both the investigation and Long’s trial have come under deepening attacks.
Long was convicted by an all-white jury after the sheriff at the time tampered with the jury pool. In the end, four of Long’s jurors either worked at Cannon Mills or were married to people who did.
Close to a dozen pieces of evidence tested by the State Bureau of Investigation — evidence that could have weakened the prosecution’s case — were never disclosed to Long’s attorneys or the jury, court documents show.
As recently as 2015, Long’s attorneys learned of 43 fingerprints police collected from the rape scene but never shared. None of the prints matched Long’s.
Semen samples taken from the victim, who has since died, were never disclosed to the defense and later disappeared.
Nonetheless, both state and federal courts have denied Long’s motions for exoneration or a new trial, saying the disputed evidence would not have changed the original outcome.
The Fourth Circuit, which hears appeals from the Carolinas, West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland, disagreed.
Calls for clemency for Ronnie Long
Wynn, who joined the court in 2010 after being nominated by President Barack Obama, said the police tactics in the case were even more disturbing due to the historic and racial weight the crime of rape carried throughout the South. At the time of Long’s arrest, a rape conviction in North Carolina still carried a possible death penalty.
“Officers hid evidence despite knowing that doing so could lead directly to Mr. Long’s death,” Wynn wrote. “Such an action is repugnant in any context. But it takes on a particularly sinister meaning here, given our country’s historical treatment of Black men accused of raping white women.”
Writing for the minority, Judge Jay Richardson of South Carolina, said the appeals court overstepped its proper role under the federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, or AEDPA, passed by Congress in 1996.
“So as long as I can reasonably read the state court’s decision to avoid an objective and indisputable error, I must do so. And here, I have no trouble doing just that,” said Richardson, a Trump nominee who joined the court in 2018 and, as a federal prosecutor, helped put Charleston mass murderer Dylann Roof on Death Row.
“The federal courts do not overturn state-court convictions based on sloppy writing or peripheral problems; our role is ‘limited’ to correcting extraordinary errors. Because I find the state court’s decision at least debatable, I think AEDPA precludes disturbing Long’s North Carolina convictions.”
The court’s ruling comes as Gov. Roy Cooper, in the middle of a re-election campaign, finds himself under increasing pressure to grant clemency to Long.
Groups of state lawmakers and religious leaders have asked the Democrat to intercede. And tens of thousands have signed a petition calling for Long to be cleared and freed.
As it stands now, Cooper, a Democrat, could become the first N.C. governor in 40 years to complete a full term without granting clemency in a single case, even as he has promised criminal justice reform following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Dory MacMillan, Cooper’s press secretary, did not immediately respond to an Observer email seeking comment.
Earlier this month, state Rep. Marcia Morey, a Durham Democrat, urged Cooper to not wait for the courts to decide the case. She said Long has already served 14 years longer than the punishment he would receive if convicted of the same charges today.
“Everything added together — the sentence he’s already served, the problems with his trial, the COVID in his prison — all leads to the fact that he deserves and is entitled to a clemency consideration by the governor.
“... It’s the perfect case. That’s why we have clemency.”
In his opinion, Wynn said North Carolina now has one last chance to present the evidence Long should have known about during his trial.
Given the history of the case, he said, it’s possible new evidence will come forward, but not if it means more delays.
‘’Forty-four years,” the judge wrote, “is an unconscionably long period to wait for justice.
“It is time.”
An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed several excerpts from the Fourth Circuit’s majority opinion in the Long case. They were written by Judge James Wynn of North Carolina.
This story was originally published August 25, 2020 at 12:31 PM with the headline "‘Ronnie Long must be free.’ New hearing ordered for man who has spent 44 years in prison."
