Ronnie Long is a free man. ‘They will never, ever, ever lock me up again.’
A federal judge from North Carolina this week called for an end to Ronnie Long’s 44-year odyssey toward freedom when he capped off his legal opinion with a three-word declaration.
“It is time,” Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James Wynn wrote.
Not quite.
At 5 p.m. Thursday, as his family, friends, lawyers and media spilled over onto the two-lane road outside of Albemarle Correctional Institution, Long was nowhere to be seen, the stop-start of his court-ordered freedom wheezing through the final clutches of prison bureaucracy.
“Think about it,” Leah Wheeler said as she leaned on her cane and gazed over at the prison gate from which Long was scheduled to emerge.
“This is the first time in 44 years he gets to choose what he wants to wear. All those choices were taken away from him when the state kidnapped him all those years before.”
Wheeler and her husband, Keith, had befriended Long in the two years since they moved to North Carolina from Columbus, Ohio, and learned about his case. They had also taken the lead on crafting what would be Long’s first fashion statement as a free man.
At Men’z Fashion in Winston-Salem, they bought him a Christmas-red vest and tie along with a matching fedora. Long told them he loved wingtips, so they picked up an Italian pair from the Johnston & Murphy store in Greensboro. “We got a great deal,” Leah confided.
Across the road, Ashleigh Long, Long’s wife of six years, walked circles around her compact car as she waited in the prison parking lot, the only person allowed to be there. She wore a T-shirt to match her tattoo: “Free Ronnie Long,” both messages read.
At 5:13 p.m., the state of North Carolina finally did.
Long was 20 years old when he was convicted of raping a prominent white woman in his hometown of Concord. Now decades later, a man in a red-brimmed hat and Italian shoes only days from his 65th birthday stepped through the prison gate and waved in response to the rising cheers.
Ronnie Wallace Long was free, his name officially cleared of a crime he says he never committed.
He hugged Ashleigh, helped her pack his prison belongings in the trunk of the car, then climbed in the front passenger seat beside her.
Within seconds, the couple had pulled away from the prison, crossed Airport Road and parked on the grassy shoulder directly across from where Long had just appeared.
There was no social distancing. Friends and family ran up to greet him. Soon, the masked Long was hugging sobbing relatives, greeting old friends by their first names. At one point he reached over and affectionately tapped the shoulder of his lead attorney for the last five years, Duke University’s Jamie Lau.
Turning to the scrum of cameras and microphones before him, Long talked of the time he had lost. What time he had left, he said, he planned to enjoy.
“It’s been a long road,” he said. “I’m glad it’s over with. It’s over with now.”
And then he paused.
“They will never ... they will never, ever, ever lock me up again.”
Waiting 44 years
By almost any measure, Long’s case is nothing short of Southern gothic.
He was accused of raping the widow of an executive of Cannon Mills, by far the most important employer in Concord. He was convicted by an all-white jury selected from a tampered jury pool. Evidence that might have proved his innocence — including semen samples and fingerprints taken from the crime scene that did not match his own — was either withheld from his attorneys or disappeared while in government hands.
Not 20 miles from where he now stood, Long was sentenced to 80 years in prison. If he had lived to see his release date, he would have been 100 years old.
Now in the heat of the roadside, as sweat appeared below the brim of his new hat, Long talked about the power of hope, and of his mother who died six weeks before his release. “Hopefully she can tell my dad and my sisters that I made it out,” he said.
He returns to a world that appears as divided as the one he left, when the treatment of Black people by police and the courts is at least as big an issue as it was in 1976, maybe bigger.
In fact, Long’s decades of appeals finally picked up speed riding the current wave of support for racial justice. This week, the Fourth Circuit ordered a lower court to hear Long’s motion for relief.
Wynn, who like Long is Black and grew up in small town North Carolina, wrote a resounding rebuke of his home state’s criminal justice system that had prosecuted Long while withholding evidence that might have kept him free.
“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.
On Thursday, the Attorney General’s Office formally dropped its defense of Long’s conviction.
Shortly before 3 p.m. U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles made it official: “Petitioner’s Oct. 1, 1976 convictions for First Degree Rape and Burglary and the two life sentences he received as a result are VACATED,” she wrote, setting off a cavalcade of cars streaming through Stanly County.
Asked by the Observer what he would say to those who illegally prosecuted him or sent him to die in prison, Long did not express bitterness, only disappointment.
“Disappointed,” he said, “in a system that’s supposed to be about right or wrong. You live and die by what you do. I knew one day I would be standing right here. I never gave up hope.”
Nearby, another Duke law professor, Charlotte native Jim Coleman, filmed the scene with the camera in his phone.
“Extraordinary,” Coleman said as he panned the crowd still packed in around his client. “It’s almost a crime that it took this long ... But it’s why we tell our students that we never give up. When we’re right, we don’t give up.”
Ronnie Long became a free man on his wife’s 35th birthday. Ashleigh Long, a former UNC Charlotte student, hadn’t seen her husband since March, when Albemarle prison was shut down to visitors by COVID-19. In fact, an active prison outbreak of the virus had threatened Long’s life right up to the hour of his release, Lau had said.
Despite her birthday, Ashleigh Long made it clear it would be her husband’s time to celebrate. For his first meal, Long said he wanted beef ribs, macaroni and cheese, a salad and a glass of lemonade. Now they had to find them.
After the questions trailed off, the Longs returned to Ashleigh’s car. Lau, the defense attorney, climbed in the backseat, and the three prepared to start the drive to Ashleigh’s home in Durham.
First, a chant broke out along the roadside, a call and response that could have been taking place in a church. “Ronnie Long is coming home. Ronnie Long is coming home,” the crowd roared.
Then a man’s voice broke in: “Ronnie Long is eating ribs. Ronnie long is eating ribs,” he said.
The laughter rolled out just as Long rode off. Away from the prison. Toward the first open horizon of the rest of his life.
This story was originally published August 27, 2020 at 7:11 PM.
