02 February 2019 :

A federal court (The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ) said Charles Ray Finch — who was sentenced to death in 1976, but later resentenced to life because of changes to state death penalty laws — is entitled to a new hearing to determine whether he is innocent. The court also discounted nearly every piece of evidence used to convict Finch of murder. The Court unanimously concluded Finch's constitutional rights were violated during three police lineups and no reasonable juror would have convicted Finch based on the totality of evidence. The Duke Wrongful Convictions Clinic has worked on Finch's case since 2001. Co-director Jim Coleman says the ruling technically sends the case back to the lower court, but he hopes state Attorney General Josh Stein will join a motion to overturn the conviction and release Finch. Finch, now 80, Black, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1976 for the Feb. 13, 1976 killing of Richard “Shadow” Holloman during a failed robbery attempt inside his country store, but he has consistently maintained his innocence. In 1977, the North Carolina Supreme Court reduced his sentence to life in prison after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared the state’s then-mandatory death penalty law unconstitutional. In a November 2013 evidentiary hearing held in Wilson County Superior Court, the lead investigator at the time, Chief Deputy Tony Owens, admitted under oath that the police lineups he conducted were unfair. The Fourth Circuit identified significant problems with the evidence used to convict Finch. He was subjected to “suggestive lineups,” in which he was the only suspect dressed in a three-quarter length jacket, the same style of clothing that the eyewitness, Lester Floyd Jones, said the perpetrator was wearing. Such lineups have since been declared unconstitutional.