Joseph Sledge stole some T-shirts from a department store. Shoplifting. Is a crime.

In middle school, high school, and college, I knew kids who shoplifted. Naming no names. Little did we realize how that leads to a lifetime of suffering.

For his evil deeds, Joseph Sledge was sentenced to four years in a North Carolina prison work camp. (Like any of the kids I knew when they got caught? Oddly, no. Different place, different race.)

One day, on the work crew, another inmate attacked Sledge, cracking his skull. The authorities revoked the attacker’s “honor” status. Then, after six months, they put him back on the same crew as Sledge.

Sledge was afraid the guy would kill him. Somehow he didn’t think prison officials worried about his safety. He jumped a fence, hid in the woods, and walked to Fayetteville.

Escaped convict!

This immediately made him a suspect in a horrible double murder, rape, and robbery that happened the next day in nearby-ish Elizabethtown.

The police picked him up and questioned him. He cooperated, retracing his route for them. They sent him back to prison, because he had taken those T-shirts. But they had no evidence connecting him with the crime. There were lots of fingerprints at the crime scene, but not his. He was still in prison shoes, and there was no blood on them, although the person who killed mother and daughter Josephine and Aileen Davis had left bloody shoe prints at the crime scene.

Months passed. The Davis murders weren’t the only murders in the area, and pressure mounted for the police to do something. A reward was offered. Armed vigilante groups patrolled the area. Police and prison officials began interviewing inmates who’d been housed with Sledge.

Soon they had two guys who said that Sledge had confessed – even boasted about – the crimes to them. A year after the murders, Sledge was charged.

At trial both inmates swore they had not been promised better treatment or a share of the reward money for testifying against Sledge. The primitive forensic science of 1978 was on the order of ‘Yes, those could easily have been his hairs. It was some black guy.’ After a mistrial, Sledge was convicted and sent to prison (no cushy work detail this time). He got two life terms, to be served one after another.

No one cared that Sledge said he was innocent. He wrote a lot of letters asking to have someone look into his case. Nothing. Years passed. Decades passed.

In 2003, Sledge (unaided by any lawyer), filed a motion to have DNA testing done on the old evidence at the crime scene. Those hairs. A court ordered a search for the evidence. But it’s not clear that anybody actually searched. They didn’t find them, so they couldn’t be tested.

In 2012 a Columbus County clerk was cleaning the evidence vault. Clean is good. She actually got on a ladder to get those high shelves. She noticed an envelope lying flat on an upper shelf. With the hairs from the crime scene inside. 2012. Recall that Sledge had been asking for those hairs to be tested since 2003. He’d written to judges, prosecutors, police. Yeah yeah yeah yeah another letter from a guy who says he didn’t do it. 2012.

It happens that North Carolina established an Innocence Inquiry Commission in 2006. (Does your state have one of these? Is your state North Carolina? It’s not? Then no.) The Commission examined Sledge’s claims. The hairs were tested, and what about that, they weren’t Sledge’s. They voted that exoneration might be in order. They were aided by attorneys for Sledge from the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence.

Another thing the Commission did was look into the matter of the inmates who’d testified that Sledge confessed. One was dead, but the other one said it had all been a lie. He lied in return for lenient treatment on a drug charge. Plus reward money. Also, the police had supplied him with details of the crime scene that had not been published, which he put into his lies about Sledge’s “confession.”

They discovered old police notes that had supposedly been destroyed. They also found that the prosecutors knew, but didn’t tell the defense, about another suspect. This person lived about 500 yards from the scene of the crime, and had been dropped off near there on the day of the killings. The police had reported that there was a shoe print near this person’s house similar to the bloody shoe prints at the scene. (Why didn’t they go after him? Might it be because he hadn’t been in prison, so they weren’t able to get prisoners to claim he’d confessed to them? Dunno.)

A special session of Superior Court was arranged. Three judges agreed that Sledge was innocent and should go free.

Some relatives of the murdered woman were not pleased. A granddaughter of one victim read a statement: “We, the family, are heartbroken by this decision. District Attorney Jon David states that he will be reopening this case, and we, the remaining family members, are shocked by this change.”

Two years earlier, another granddaughter had expressed incredulity that the evidence against Sledge was being examined. “I heard about it, but I don’t believe it,” she said. “I just don’t, because he’s the one that done it.” She was the one who discovered the bodies.

A grandson had taken a different view, saying if Sledge was guilty, he should stay in prison. But if not, the grandson would be angry at law enforcement for punishing the wrong person, and letting the guilty person go free.

Jon David, the county’s current district attorney, spoke to the court about what had gone wrong in Sledge’s case. The technology had been greatly inferior. Sledge’s escape, and the testimony about his “confession” made it an open and shut case. (David is not the one who prosecuted Sledge so long ago.)

“There’s nothing we regret more to our values as prosecutors than to believe an innocent person is in prison,” David said. “There’s nothing worse for a prosecutor than convicting an innocent person.”

Let me just be the first on behalf of the State of North Carolina to apologize to Mr. Sledge.

and:

The ‘sorry’ is imperfect to convey the magnitude of what happened with respect to this man’s life.

He said he would request the state re-open the case. “The system has made a mistake. The wrong man is in prison.”

That’s nice. Back in 2013, when the Innocence Commission had the new DNA evidence and the changed testimony about the ‘confession,’ David was adamant that Sledge was the murderer and filed documents opposing the claim. He said the evidence wasn’t so relevant and had little validity. A first lab that looked at the hair samples found they were too “degraded” (because old) to test.

And David didn’t think anyone should be impressed by the jailhouse snitch’s new testimony. “The circumstances surrounding the defendant’s obtaining the alleged ‘recantation are important for the court to consider when evaluating what, if any, credibility to assign Mr. Baker’s recent affidavit. Mr. Baker’s physical and mental state are also legitimate subjects of inquiry,” he wrote.

Sledge used the word ‘sorry’ too, not in an apology but in sympathy. He told the victims’ relatives, “I’m very, very sorry for your loss. I hope you get closure in this matter.”

Joseph Sledge went free. He was embraced by his sister, his brother, a nephew he’d never met, and by his lawyers from the Center on Actual Innocence. They took him out for oyster stew. He’s due $750,000 for 36 years in prison. I want him to live happily ever after.

David’s apology is a good precedent, but not a good apology. It’s not a performative utterance, in that he says he’s apologizing to Mr. Sledge, but doesn’t actually say “I apologize, Mr. Sledge” or “I’m sorry, Mr. Sledge.” There’s too much about the suffering of prosecutors.

‘What happened to you was awful. We totally hate when that happens, worse than anything! Hate it! It hurts us here.’

Yet, bad as it is, it counts for a lot. And re-opening the case is the right thing to do, even though it’s awfully late.

I will argue that more apologies are due. Obviously Sledge is the individual who suffered the most from this miscarriage of justice. (Unless – the actual killer then killed more people after the DA’s office said Sledge was the culprit.)

All citizens are owed an apology for the framing of the wrong guy, and for the real killer going free. We’re owed an apology for the degradation of our justice system.

One of Sledge’s attorneys from the NC Center on Actual Innocence, Christine Mumma, made this comment on the envelope of hair samples that Sledge asked to have re-tested for so long: “I understand the shelf was high, but there was a ladder.”

We’re owed efforts to make the system better. For example, I want to hear about ways to prevent convictions on the basis of jailhouse snitches who will make money and go free if they give false testimony. (Mr. David?) Not a new idea. It’s why the supposed confession-hearers testified at Sledge’s first trial that they had not been promised better treatment or a share of the reward money for testifying. Because everyone knows that could influence what people say. There were people who knew that was perjury, and didn’t speak up. People who had offered the better treatment and reward money.

What happened to Sledge was so devastating that some people will say “What good is an apology? It won’t give him back 36 years. It won’t give him back his youth.” It’s true no one can give him back that time. But we can give him some satisfaction: that of knowing that everybody knows what happened to him was wrong. Even the agencies that did it to him admit it was wrong.

Frank O’Connell, a man who was wrongly convicted of murder in Los Angeles and spent 27 years in prison, is suing LA county. As reported in The New Yorker, he said, “I will accept twelve million with a public apology, or fourteen million with a private apology to me and my family, or eighteen million with no apology whatsoever.” He wants them to take responsibility for framing him. “If they would say, ‘I was wrong, and I’m sorry,’ I would say, ‘I forgive you.’”

That’s probably similar to the thinking of many exonerated prisoners. O’Connell simply made it explicit.

Think of what these men lost. Think of how much it means to them to get an apology. Think of how much government agencies are willing to pay not to apologize.

Don’t tell me apologies aren’t important.