$25m Settlement For North Carolina Man After Wrongful Conviction

The city of Concord, North Carolina will have to pay out a record settlement for its part in wrongfully convicting Ronnie Long and issue a formal apology to him. Long was 21 years old in 1976 when he was sentenced to life in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. He spent 44 years behind bars until the courts finally overturned his conviction in 2020, citing the “troubling and striking pattern of deliberate police suppression of material evidence.”

Attorneys with the Duke Wrongful Convictions Clinic worked for decades on the case, showing there was jury tampering, that the detectives lied on the stand and hid evidence that would have freed Long. "Not only did law enforcement officers lie but prosecutors engaged in an active campaign to ensure despite the evidence of Ronnie’s innocence he remained incarcerated all these years, well past the time it was obvious they had a wrongful conviction," Jamie Lau, the supervising attorney at the Duke Wrongful Convictions Clinic, said. Lau worked on Long's case beginning in 2015.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper formally pardoned Long in December 2020, making way for him to receive $750,000 in restitution from the state. But Long and his team filed a civil suit against the city of Concord, the detectives on the case and the State Bureau of Investigation. As part of the settlement in that case, the city of Concord agreed to pay him $22 million and the State Bureau of Investigation paid him $3 million. That is the largest settlement of its kind in the state’s history, and one of the largest ever in U.S. history. The city of Concord also issued a formal apology which is another rare happening.

Long had insisted on the public apology, along with the monetary settlement.

“One of the biggest things for him, even through those 44 years, was to clear not only his name, but his family’s name, to make it known that he was not involved in the assault that led to his conviction and to make it known that he came from a good, working-class family in Concord,” Lau said.

After his conviction was overturned in 2020, Long said "We never, ever give up. Don't make no difference how rough it may seem, don't make no difference how rough it may get, don't give up. Always believe that you can overcome and do what you need to do in order to survive. I always believed that one day I'd be standing where I'm standing right now, and I never gave up hope."

You can read more about Long's case on his page at the Duke Wrongful Convictions Clinic website.