Ricky Dority spends most of his days playing with his grandchildren, feeding chickens and working in the garden where he lives with his son’s family.
It’s a shocking change from where he was just a few months ago, locked in a cell serving a life sentence at Oklahoma’s Joseph Harp Correctional Center in a murder he said he did not commit. After more than two decades behind bars, Mr. Dority had no chance of being released – until he used his pandemic relief funds to hire a dogged private investigator.
The investigator and students at the Oklahoma Innocence Project at Oklahoma City University, which is dedicated to exonerating wrongful convictions in the state, found inconsistencies in the state’s version of a 1997 cold case murder, and Mr. Dority’s conviction was vacated by a Sequoyah County judge in June.
Now says Mr. Dority he enjoys the 5-acre property in a quiet neighborhood of affluent homes in the rolling, wooded hills of the Arkansas River Valley outside of Fort Smith. “If you’ve been away for many years, you no longer take it for granted.”
Mr. Dority is one of nearly 3,400 people exonerated across the country since 1989, mostly from murder convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. In Oklahoma, there have been more than 43 releases in that time, not including three new releases this year.
The cases highlight a serious problem facing a justice system in which many old convictions have resulted from overworked defense attorneys, sloppy forensic work, overzealous prosecutors and outdated investigative techniques.
The problem is particularly acute given Oklahoma’s history of sending people to death row, where 11 inmates have been exonerated since 1981. The issue has pushed a Republican-led legislative panel to consider whether to impose a death penalty moratorium.
In Oklahoma County, Glynn Ray Simmons was freed after spending nearly 50 years in prison, including time on death row, in a 1974 murder after a judge determined prosecutors failed to turn over evidence in the case, including ‘ a police report which showed that an eyewitness may have identified other suspects.
And just this week, Perry Lott, who served more than 30 years in prison, had his Pontotoc County rape and burglary convictions vacated after new DNA tests ruled him out as the perpetrator. Pontotoc County, in particular, has come under intense scrutiny for a series of wrongful convictions in the 1980s that have been the subject of numerous books, including John Grisham’s “The Innocent Man,” which he produced in a six-part documentary on Netflix .
The most common causes of wrongful convictions are eyewitness misidentification, misapplication of forensic science, false confessions, coerced pleas and official misconduct, usually by police or prosecutors, according to the Innocence Project, a national organization based in New York.
In Mr. Dority’s case, he said, was railroaded by an overzealous sheriff and a state prosecutor eager to solve the murder of 28-year-old Mitchell Nixon, who was found beaten to death in 1997.
Investigators who reopened the case in 2014 coerced a confession from another man, Rex Robbins, according to Andrea Miller, the legal director of the Oklahoma Innocence Project. Mr. Robbins, who would plead guilty to manslaughter in Mr. Nixon’s assassination, Mr. Dority, who was in federal prison at the time, on a firearms conviction. Mr. Dority said he knows he had nothing to do with the crime and found paperwork 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,” Mr. Dority said. “But they tried me for it and found me guilty of it.”
Jurors heard from Mr. Robbins’ confession and testimony from a police informant who said that Mr. Dority changed bloody clothes at his house on the night of the murder. They found him guilty of first-degree murder and recommended a life sentence without parole.
After years in prison, while most inmates spent their federal COVID-19 relief check in the commissary, Mr. Dority used his to hire a private investigator, he said. Bobby Staton mostly investigated insurance fraud, but he took on the case and quickly realized it was riddled with holes, Mr. Staton said.
He eventually turned to the university’s Oklahoma Innocence Project, which assigned a law student, Abby Brawner, to help investigate.
Their investigation turned when Mr. Staton and Ms. Brawner visited Robbins in the maximum security Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, and he gave his statement that Mr. Dority implies, withdrawn.
“It was pretty intimidating,” Ms. Brawner said. “Especially when you go in to meet someone who doesn’t know you’re coming and doesn’t want to talk to you.”
Mrs. Brawner and Mr. Staton also learned that the informant did not live at the home where he told investigators that Mr. Staton arrived in bloody clothes. When the actual homeowner testified at a trial this summer, the judge dismissed the case.
Mr. Dority’s original attorneys were ineffective for failing to discover that the informant did not live at the home, the judge said, giving prosecutors 90 days to decide whether to retry him. Those three months were extended, and prosecutors said they intended to ask the judge for more time for DNA testing. Mr. Confident of his innocence, Dority said he is not concerned about additional forensic tests.
Sequoyah County District Attorney Jack Thorp and former Sheriff Ron Lockhart did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press. But Assistant District Attorney James Dunn, who is overseeing the case and was not in the office when it was originally prosecuted, said he agreed with the judge’s dismissal after hearing the homeowner’s testimony and learning from a witness “was not credible.”
“The last thing I want to see is an innocent person in jail for a crime they didn’t commit,” Mr. Dunn said. “Because it means the person who did commit the crime, or those persons, is still out there.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Dority to use a smart phone and the television remote control, he said. He is grateful to Mr. Staton and the Innocence Project and say his case proves others are wrongly incarcerated in Oklahoma.
“After they did what they did to me, I know there are people in that prison who are innocent who need to get out and need help to get out,” he said. “If they hadn’t taken me out, I would have been there for the rest of my life.”
This story was reported by The Associated Press.