Ricky Dority spends most of his time playing with his grandchildren, feeding chickens and working in the yard where he and his son’s family live.
It’s a shocking change from just a few months ago, when he was sitting in a cell at Oklahoma’s Joseph Harp Correctional Center serving a life sentence for a killing he claimed he did not commit. After more than two decades in prison, Dority had no chance of being released — until he used his own pandemic relief funds to hire a tenacious private investigator.
In June, Sequoia County dropped Dority’s case after investigators and students from Oklahoma City University’s Oklahoma Innocence Project discovered inconsistencies in the state’s account of the 1997 cold case homicide. Conviction, a project dedicated to exonerating wrongful convictions in the state. Judge.
Now, the 65-year-old says he is enjoying the five-acre property, surrounded by wealthy homes in the rolling, forested hills of the Arkansas River Valley outside Fort Smith. “If you’re away for many years, you don’t take it for granted anymore.”
Dority is one of nearly 3,400 people across the country who have been acquitted since 1989, most of whom were convicted of murder, according to the National Police Service. National Innocence Registry. In Oklahoma, there have been more than 43 acquittals at that time, not including three new acquittals this year.
The cases highlight a serious problem facing the justice system, with many old convictions resulting from overworked defense attorneys, shoddy forensic work, overzealous prosecutors and outdated investigative techniques.
This problem is particularly acute given the situation in Oklahoma The history of sending people to death rowSince 1981, 11 prisoners have been exonerated.The issue prompted a Republican-led legislative panel to consider whether Moratorium on executions should be imposed.
exist Oklahoma CountyGlynn Ray Simmons was imprisoned for nearly 50 years in a 1974 murder case, including time on death row, before a judge determined prosecutors failed to turn over evidence in the case. It included a police report that suggested witnesses may have identified others. suspects.
And just this week, Perry LottSpent more than 30 years in prison, convicted of rape and theft Pontotoc County Vacant After new DNA testing, he was ruled out as the perpetrator. Pontotoc County, in particular, came under intense scrutiny in the 1980s for a series of wrongful convictions that became the subject of numerous books, including John Grisham’s The Innocents. The Innocent Man, which he turned into a six-part documentary on Netflix.
The Innocence Project, a national organization based in New York, said the most common causes of wrongful convictions are eyewitness misidentification, misuse of forensic science, false confessions, coerced confessions and official misconduct, often by police or prosecutors. Caused by officials.
In Doty’s case, he said he was beset by an overzealous sheriff and a state prosecutor eager to solve the problem. Mitchell Nickerson, 28, was killedHe was found beaten to death in 1997.
Andrea Miller, legal director of the Oklahoma Innocence Project, said investigators who reopened the case in 2014 coerced another man, Rex Robbins, into confessing. Robbins pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the fatal shooting of Nickerson, implicating Dority, who was in federal prison on firearms charges at the time. Dority said he knew he had nothing to do with the crime and found documents proving he was arrested on the day of the murder.
“I thought I was in the clear because I knew I had nothing to do with that murder,” Dority said. “But they tried me and found me guilty.”
Jurors heard Robbins’ confession and testimony from a police informant who said Dority changed into bloody clothes at his home the night of the murder. They convicted him of first-degree murder and recommended a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Years after incarceration, while most inmates spent their federal COVID-19 relief checks at the commissary, Dority used the commissary to hire a private investigator, he said. Bobby Staton had primarily investigated insurance fraud, but he took on the case and quickly realized it was riddled with holes, Staton said.
He eventually turned to the university’s Oklahoma Innocence Project, which assigned a law student, Abby Brawner, to help with the investigation.
Their investigation took a turn when Staton and Brauner visited Robbins at the Oklahoma State Correctional Facility in Granite, and Robbins retracted the statement implicating Dority.
“It’s very intimidating,” Brawner said. “Especially when you’re going to meet someone who doesn’t know you’re coming and doesn’t want to talk to you.”
Brauner and Staton also learned that the informant did not live in the house where he told investigators Staton showed up in bloody clothing. When the actual homeowners testified at a hearing this summer, a judge dismissed the case.
The judge said Dority’s original lawyers had no role in finding out the informant did not live in the home and gave prosecutors 90 days to decide whether to retry him. Those three months have been extended, and prosecutors have said they plan to ask the judge for more time to conduct DNA testing. Dority remains confident in his innocence and said he is not concerned about additional forensic testing.
Sequoia County District Attorney Jack Thorpe and former Sheriff Ron Lockhart did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press. But Assistant District Attorney James Dunn, who oversaw the case, said he agreed with the judge’s dismissal after hearing the homeowner’s testimony and learning the witness was “not credible.”
“The last thing I want to see is an innocent person go to jail for a crime they didn’t commit,” Dunn said. “Because it means the person or persons who actually committed the crime are still at large.”
Meanwhile, Dority is learning to use a smartphone and a TV remote, he said. He thanked Staton and the Innocence Project and said his case proves others are wrongfully incarcerated in Oklahoma.
“After what they did to me, I know there are people in prison who are innocent and need to get out and need help to get out,” he said. “If they hadn’t gotten me out, I would have spent the rest of my life there.”
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