He served 43 years for a murder he didn’t commit. Now he’s suing the county, sheriff and SBI.
Charles Ray Finch spent 43 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, finally winning his release in May as an 82-year-old man suffering from cancer, stricken by a stroke and estranged from children he could not watch grow up.
On Wednesday, his lawyers filed a federal lawsuit against Wilson County, Sheriff Calvin Woodard Jr., two former deputies and two staffers with the State Bureau of Investigation, seeking compensation for Finch’s decades behind bars.
The suit chronicles corruption in Wilson County beginning in the 1970s, all of it watched over by then-Sheriff W. Robin Pridgen, who was convicted on federal racketeering charges in 1979 after taking bribes to let brothels operate out of motels and a truck stop.
The suit accuses two of his deputies, Tony Owens and James Tant, of conspiring in a variety of crimes, including manufacturing the evidence to frame Finch for murder. It further accuses SBI agent Alan McMahan of covering up for the sheriff and Owens, and also SBI general counsel John Watters of hiding evidence that could have cleared Finch.
Finch went free in May, his sentence vacated after a 15-year investigation by Duke University’s Wrongful Conviction Clinic. Of all convicts who were exonerated and freed nationwide, the suit said, only two men have served longer terms.
“For 43 years, he was not allowed to see and experience the outside world,” states the suit, filed in U.S. District Court by the Charlotte firm Rudolf Widenhouse. “He was confined in small rooms with concrete walls, concrete floors, and virtually no amenities people in the outside world enjoyed. Day in and day out, he ate prison food and wore prison clothes.”
The News & Observer contacted Wilson County for comment Wednesday, but Assistant County Manager Ron Hunt said the county was not yet aware of the lawsuit.
Insidious, wide-ranging and perverse
Pridgen died in 2012. The lawsuit describes his office accepting bribes to protect prostitution rings, illegal gambling and drug dealers — illicit operations that came to light after a 1977 FBI investigation. During that investigation, the FBI learned that sheriff’s office employees would identify Wilson County businesses with large amounts of cash on hand, arrange for them to be robbed then split the money with the robbers.
In February 1976, the sheriff’s office organized a robbery at Richard Holloman’s country store, according to the suit. Both Pridgen and Owens knew about the robbery in advance, and when Holloman was shot multiple times and killed, Owens was waiting in his car less than a mile away, the suit said.
Owens knew Finch, the suit said, because Finch had testified a year before in a case against the deputy’s uncle, identifying the uncle as the man who had helped kill his brother. Owens had vowed to “get him,” the suit said.
Finch denied involvement in the shooting, and told deputies about another man who had admitted the crime and described hiding the shotgun behind a building in downtown Wilson.
Finch did not match a witness description, the suit said, but Owens suggested that the witness change his story to include the black coat Finch was wearing. During a lineup Owens arranged, Finch was the only suspect wearing a coat.
“Owens intentionally ‘marked’ Ray Finch as the perpetrator,” the suit said.
Deputy Tant searched Finch’s car and said he found a shotgun shell in the back seat, and during Finch’s trial, he opened it and passed the pellets among members of the jury, having them compare pellets taken from the dead store owner’s body.
But Owens had hidden an SBI ballistics report saying agents were not able to learn the gauge or make of the crime-scene pellets — evidence that would have helped Finch at trial.
Almost a year after Finch’s conviction, the FBI began its investigation into Pridgen’s sheriff’s office and found “corruption that was insidious, wide-ranging, and perverse,” the suit said. “The Wilson County Sheriff’s Department was run with an ‘anything goes’ mentality.”
“Routinely ignored or thwarted”
In 1979, shortly after Pridgen’s conviction, Finch filed a motion seeking to have his sentence vacated, then wrote new Sheriff L.G. Taylor insisting that Owens was hiding the real killer’s identity to protect himself. Taylor sought help from the SBI, which assigned McMahan to the case.
But the SBI agent never contacted the FBI or tried to contact any of the potential witnesses Finch had named, reporting back to Sheriff Taylor that the stories about corruption could not be confirmed.
In 2001, Duke University’s Innocence Project took up Finch’s case, quickly learning that files and evidence had been concealed or destroyed. Watters, counsel for the SBI, would not release the agency’s files, the suit said, though it included the ballistics report and an eyewitness description of another man at Holloman’s killing.
By 2008, the suit said, Watters told the Innocence Project that no evidence could be found. He did not turn over the ballistics report for 10 years after the first request in 2003.
“Mr. Finch fought for years to establish his innocence,” the suit said, “and was routinely ignored or thwarted in his efforts by those persons who guarded and concealed the information.”
Finch is seeking a jury trial and an unspecified amount of compensatory and punitive damages.
This story was originally published December 4, 2019 at 12:51 PM with the headline "He served 43 years for a murder he didn’t commit. Now he’s suing the county, sheriff and SBI.."