Official misconduct

Police fed details to a 12-year-old boy who had not actually witnessed the crime, intimidated him when he tried to recant, and suppressed both that attempted recantation and an undisclosed cash payment made to him — a case the National Registry of Exonerations documents in detail. Jackson served 39 years before his conviction was vacated.

Just after 9:30 p.m. on April 25, 1976, a man broke into a house on South Union Street in Concord, North Carolina, and raped Sarah Bost, a 54-year-old white widow who was home alone. The attacker covered her face and told her not to look at him. Bost did not identify anyone from a photo array at the hospital, and her first description was of a Black man in a dark leather jacket with no mention of facial hair. Later she described him as "light-skinned" or "yellow." Ronnie Long, a 20-year-old Black cement mason who lived with his parents, was arrested on a trespassing charge on April 29. Instead of showing Bost his photo, police brought her to his May 10 court date, where she sat disguised in a red wig and sunglasses and told officers he was her attacker before he said a word. Police then arrested him for rape and burglary. An all-white jury, seated from a 49-person pool that included only two Black residents after law enforcement screened the jury list, convicted him on October 1, 1976. He was sentenced to life. No physical evidence tied him to the crime, and several alibi witnesses had placed him elsewhere that night. Thirty years later, records finally released under a 2005 court order showed that the State Bureau of Investigation had tested 14 pieces of evidence in 1976 and that none of it implicated Long. The lead detective had told the jury the opposite, and a later judge wrote that he "lied. Repeatedly." Forty-three fingerprints lifted from the scene, never disclosed, excluded Long. In August 2020 the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, by a 9-6 vote, reversed the dismissal of his habeas petition. He walked out on August 27, 2020, after 44 years, 3 months, and 17 days. Governor Roy Cooper pardoned him on grounds of innocence on December 17, 2020. In January 2024 the City of Concord agreed to pay $22 million and the State of North Carolina $3 million to settle his civil-rights lawsuit.

Byron Halsey spent 19 years in New Jersey prisons for the 1985 sexual assault and murders of the two young children of his girlfriend, Margaret Urquhart, in the Plainfield rooming house where they all lived. Police interrogated Halsey — a man with a sixth-grade education and severe learning disabilities — for roughly 30 hours over a 40-hour span until he signed a statement that prosecutors used as a confession, and they stopped investigating neighbor Clifton ("Cliff") Hall. DNA testing obtained by the Innocence Project in 2006 excluded Halsey and identified Hall as the source of crime-scene evidence; Halsey's convictions were vacated on May 15, 2007, and all charges were dismissed on July 9, 2007.

The Registry documents official misconduct alongside the bite-mark testimony that convicted Brewer — evidence and process failures that, combined with the later-discredited forensic testimony, contributed to his wrongful conviction and death sentence.

A key witness testified at a post-conviction hearing that she had been coached by the prosecutor and that police let her keep drugs they had planted on her in exchange for her cooperation — testimony that, along with a named alternate suspect who repeatedly admitted guilt to others, led to Ways's conviction being reversed.

Stephon Downer was convicted in 2002 of the March 1997 felony murder of Carlos Ruiz in Camden County, NJ. Four witnesses say he was not at the scene and have independently identified another man, Jimel Quann (known as "Rat Rat"), as the person involved in the robbery and shooting. The surviving eyewitness, Edelmiro Robles, has since said he could not confirm his identification and that detectives told him Downer was the shooter before he picked him from a photo array. A jailhouse informant has also said he can no longer recall the substance of any conversation with Downer. Downer has now spent over 20 years incarcerated.

Jill Halliburton Su was found dead in her Davie, Florida home on September 8, 2014, bound and stabbed in a bathtub. Nine days later, a DNA database search returned the name of Dayonte Resiles, then twenty years old, with no known connection to the victim or her family. He was arrested the following day. The State's case rested on DNA. Prosecutors told jurors that Mr. Resiles' DNA was recovered from items at the scene and that this established he was the killer. The defense argued throughout that a DNA association does not establish who committed a homicide, when the DNA was deposited, or how it got there. His first trial ended in a mistrial in December 2021 under extraordinary circumstances: the jury returned a manslaughter verdict, and when jurors were polled, one said she did not agree with it. Following the mistrial, a juror stated that some jurors had been unwilling to convict on the greater charge because of his race. A retrial three months later produced a first-degree murder conviction. The Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed in a one-word per curiam opinion in January 2025. Mr. Resiles has maintained his innocence for twelve years, including in a letter to the court and in open court at his own sentencing. Xonorate is supporting his request for independent post-conviction review.