Freeing the innocent is worth the small price NC pays for wrongful conviction agency | Opinion

It’s hard to find a cause everyone agrees on. But here’s one: Innocent men and women shouldn’t be convicted or imprisoned. That’s for the guilty.

So it alarmed me to read the state Senate proposes to end the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission (IIC), an agency whose mission is to identify and free wrongly convicted North Carolinians. The IIC is the only of its kind in the nation. It’s the result of an unprecedented collaboration between prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, police, crime victims and exonerees. These are people who normally disagree. They also see our criminal justice system up close. A group of them set out to make it better. As a conservative judge remarked to a liberal defense attorney: “Nobody could be against this.”

I know the IIC well. I wrote the book on it. Ghost of The Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption is about the figures who created an extraordinary solution to an ordinary problem and one of its early, dramatic cases. The man at its center, Willie Grimes, was as innocent as you and me. Willie wasn’t just “not guilty.” He wasn’t an accessory. He wasn’t even a witness. He was across town with friends. Nothing to do with the crime. Our system is good but not perfect. A jury sentenced Willie to life in prison.

You might have the luxury of thinking this is impossible, a truly innocent person can’t be convicted in America, no one gets all the way to prison without doing something wrong. Willie thought that, too. So did every exoneree I met in my reporting. To them the courtroom was a confusing mix-up. After, they expected to go back home, back to work, to family, to regular life.

Today we know better. Wrongful convictions are a national scourge. They’re also a nonpartisan issue. Beyond the moral horror, they’re a public safety failure. For every wrongly convicted person an actual criminal wanders the streets. There’s nothing tougher on crime than getting the right guy. (Or woman — most wrongful convictions are of men, like convictions generally. But try telling that to Sabrina Butler.)

Sabrina was convicted in Mississippi. North Carolina isn’t alone in being imperfect. The state is no worse than others. North Carolina is only alone in doing something about it.

Regular appeals often cannot help in a case like Willie’s. Neither can nonprofits, who do amazing work but pursue just a sliver of cases. Not for indifference. For capacity. A nonprofit relies on grants, donations, and student volunteers. The IIC, as an independent state agency, has more muscle. It can conduct searches and forensic tests. It can subpoena evidence and witnesses. If an old case is a darkened room, nonprofits have flashlights. The IIC can flip the light switch.

As soon as Willie was convicted in 1988, at 41 years old, he filed appeals. He wrote to every local nonprofit. He applied to Prisoner Legal Services. (“While I personally believe you are innocent, that does not mean that I can get you a trial,” staff replied.) He finally filled out an IIC questionnaire in October 2010. In 2011, investigators found fingerprints from the original crime scene. In 2012, three independent judges agreed Willie was innocent by “clear and convincing evidence.” The IIC had taken two years to solve a crime no one else had solved for a quarter century.

Had the IIC existed in the first place, Willie might have gone home at 43. Instead he was 65.

Since the IIC was founded, it has exonerated 16 men. That’s almost one life saved per year, on average, from sentences as awful as Willie’s. Combined, the men served more than 300 years in prison. In many of their cases, including Willie’s, the IIC did more than set them free. It also identified the actual perpetrator, whom it handed over to prosecutors. All on a budget that is 0.005% of North Carolina’s annual spending. Talk about efficiency.

A day after the Senate proposed ending the IIC, the agency did it again, exonerating Clarence Roberts. (“Like a sign from God,” one expert said.) Clarence was wrongly convicted in 2017. Cases like Clarence’s and Willie’s still happen. Will North Carolina still do something about them?