Story by: Cee Cee Huffman
Trial Audio: News & Observer
Howard Dudley says he loves quiet. And driving down backroads. And Kinston.
“Because people know me,” Dudley said. “This is where my roots is at.”
But for almost 24 years, Dudley was locked away from the things he loved. In nineteen
ninety-two, he was charged with first-degree sexual offense and taking indecent liberties with a minor.
“I was found guilty of both of those charges, and I didn’t commit ne’er one of ‘em,” Dudley said. “When you know that you are innocent, you don’t carry a guilt. You just know that, at some point in time, this is gonna come to an end.”
He says he thought he would appeal and be in prison for maybe six months. Instead, he waited
until 2016 for Duke Law’s Wrongful Convictions clinic to prove official misconduct, inadequate
legal defense and false accusation.
“And people tell me all the time, ‘You ain’t even angry,’” he said. “No, because I don’t want to go back to prison. I want to live my life. I wish I had a relationship with my children, I wish I didn’t suffer so many things that I suffered in prison, but you know, I’m free.”
He lost his relationship with his sons. Both his mother and his wife passed away while he was in
there, so couldn’t attend either funeral.
“It’s enough to make you bitter now,” Dudley said. “If it can happen to me, it can happen to you.”
In the end, Dudley was a victim. He’s out of prison, but he’s not healed, and he’s exactly the
type of person Jennifer Thompson wants to help.
Thompson became a key player in a wrongful conviction after a man broke into her apartment and raped her at knifepoint. Out of two line-ups, she’d picked Ronald Cotton.
“He was a menace. He was a danger,” Thompson said. “I really wanted to help the police, obviously, get this person off the streets.”
D-N-A evidence later showed the perpetrator was actually Bobby Poole.
“And now I was the bad person. I was the demon,” she said. “It was a completely different type of trauma.”
She had to find her own healing. That’s when she launched the Healing Justice Project.
“No one had thought about addressing the aftermath of these issues,” Thompson said.
So that’s what her non-profit does. It serves the crime victims, the survivors, wrongly convicted
people like Dudley and all of their families, too. Anyone a wrongful conviction can touch.
“We all kind of sit in a silo thinking ‘My God, no one’s experienced what I’ve experienced,’” Thompson said. “We stay in our heads and we don’t share our story with anyone else that has had a similar experience, and that’s big.”
She says that having peer support would’ve been huge for her, and Healing Justice retreats
create a safe and confidential space for just that.
“The truth of Healing Justice, I have to say, was always there,” she said. “It was in my bones and in my cells, and it was in my blood, and it was in my sweat and every tear I ever cried. It was just always there.”
Attorney Jonathan Broun works for North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services and has represented
wrongfully accused persons. He sees people struggle with verdicts often.
“I am sure it’s incredibly hard for someone who’s been told for years that this is the person who killed their loved ones and justice has been done,” Broun said, “and then they’re told years later ‘Whoops, we got the wrong person.’”
He says that, there are some things now in place, like D-N-A testing, that are helping to find
more cases of exonerations.
“But what they show now is that we have sort of solved the bigger problem, but there’s a much bigger problem out there,” he said. “There’s a lot more people that are in prison that should not be in prison.”
…
Dudley still carries a picture of his wife in his pocket.
“She supported me until she fell dead,” Dudley said. “And I know – I miss her a lot. I miss her a lot.”
He says it took him awhile to realize she was not coming back, but his life is coming back
together, slowly.
“I get in my truck, I fill it up with gas and I just ride in the country,” Dudley said. “Open the windows up, get fresh air and just ride out in the country. I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know where I”m coming out at, but it’s just therapeutic for me. And I enjoy it.”
And now, he says all is well.
