The Impacts of Involvement: how exonerations affect more than just the released

Story by: Olivia Clark

Cover photo by: Olivia Clark

Every morning, Howard Dudley goes for a walk.

In Kinston, North Carolina, where he was born, raised and eventually imprisoned, Dudley breathes in fresh air and a sense of community—a community that always believed in his innocence.

Some days, he gets in his truck, rolls the windows down, drives aimlessly and just breathes. Just breathes.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” Dudley says. “I don’t know where I’m coming out, but it’s therapeutic for me. I enjoy it.”

Every morning, Howard Dudley thanks God.

He thanks God for his disability benefits, for without them, he wouldn’t be able to afford his apartment. He thanks God for his girlfriend, whom he plans to marry one day.

He thanks God that, after almost 24 years of wrongful imprisonment, he is no longer accused of having sexually assaulted his 9-year-old daughter.

Every morning, Howard Dudley moves another step closer to starting over.  

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In 2018, 151 people were exonerated of crimes in the United States, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. In total, these wrongful imprisonments resulted in 1,639 years lost to prison. 1,639 years away from loved ones.

Life post-exoneration looks different for everybody. Some people receive monetary compensation. Some go to therapy. Some find themselves back in prison. Everyone is emotionally affected.

But exonerations affect more people than just those who are released from prison. They affect the crime victims, the lawyers who originally put them in prison, and the lawyers who get them out. And exonerations affect the families of all of them—those families that were robbed of years without their loved ones, as well as those that may now have no closure for the deaths of their own.

For Dudley, 24 years in prison cost him his relationships with his two sons, who were 2 and 4 when he was first imprisoned in 1992.

“I don’t have a relationship with my boys,” Dudley said. “I didn’t go to the football games; I didn’t go to the graduations. It’s like I’m just another person, and they just took all this from me for no reason at all.”

Dudley also lost his mother and his wife while in prison. He still carries a faded, pocket-sized photo of his wife around with him in his wallet.

When he was released in 2016, Dudley walked out of prison with $45 and serious back injuries. Had he not had siblings in Kinston, he would not have had a roof over his head.

“When you lack in finance, getting settled back into society, it’s not always easy,” Dudley said.

But Dudley stays positive. He has built a relationship with the daughter he was accused of harming. They drive down the road together and talk over Bojangles’ Famous Chicken ‘n Biscuits, but rarely about her role in his imprisonment. Rather than dwelling in what has been done, Dudley chooses to move forward as best as he can and to live without regret.

“I wish I had a relationship with my children,” Dudley said. “I wish I didn’t suffer so much of the pain that I suffered in prison, but I’m free. It’s been really difficult, but I’m not going to panic. I’m just gonna continue to put the pieces together and get back on my foot and move on with life.”

As a death penalty and, in some cases, exoneration lawyer, Jonathan Broun, the senior staff attorney at Personal Legal Services in Raleigh, has stood with wrongfully convicted individuals before, during and after their exonerations, witnessing first-hand the emotional rollercoaster exonerees take.

“All of it is, you know, incredibly emotional and it’s emotional in different ways,” Broun said. “We don’t want to set up people who have been released, whether exonerated or who in fact did the crime but did the time that we have determined that they should do, to be set up for failure, so obviously we want to get as much services as we can for those folks as possible.”

This type of service is exactly what Jennifer Thompson sought to create when she founded Healing Justice.

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Like Dudley and Broun, Jennifer Thompson has experienced the emotional struggles of life post-exoneration. She, however, knows the pain not as an exoneree, but as the crime’s victim.

When she was a 22-year-old college student, Thompson was brutally raped at knifepoint in her apartment. Through the fear and the pain, she persevered. She studied the man’s face, his features and his voice so that she could help the police to catch him if she made it out alive.

Ronald Cotton was arrested on Aug. 1, 1984, and with the guidance of the police, Thompson picked him out of a photographic lineup, and later a physical lineup. In January, Cotton was tried in court, found guilty and sentenced to life and 54 years.

“As the crime survivor, you’re thinking that’s all there is to it,” Thompson said. “And of course, it’s never that easy, and never that neat and tidy.”

Cotton was tried again in 1987, this time with another rape charge, and was found guilty of both. Having gone through her attack and two trials in two years, Thompson was emotionally overcome, hoping it all was behind her.

But of course, it was not.

DNA testing cleared Cotton in 1995, pinpointing Bobby Poole as her actual attacker. Thompson was completely devastated. She had been raped, she had been put through trials, she had been depressed, and now, she had been told that what she had known to be true was actually a lie.

“Every time these kinds of things happen to victims and survivors and the murdered person’s family members, your life is just ripped into millions of pieces,” Thompson said. “Every time it gets ripped into pieces, there’s less of you that you can retrieve, and there’s pieces of you that just never make their way back.”

Thompson spent the next 15 years of her life as the poster-girl for mistaken eyewitness identification.

“Ronald had come out of prison and he was the hero, and I was now the bad person,” Thompson said. “I was the demon. I was the perpetrator. I was the offender, and I didn’t have any tools about where to put this new thing that I was struggling with.”

So, she decided to change the narrative.

After years of self-criticism, she finally realized that she didn’t send Ronald Cotton to prison, the state of North Carolina did. She discovered the need for a movement acknowledging that exonerations affect not only exonerees, but also crime victims and survivors and all of their families. In 2015, Thompson founded Healing Justice, a national nonprofit organization offering restorative justice in the aftermath of wrongful convictions, so that she could provide other victims of exonerations—exonerees, survivors and families alike—with the help that she needed but never got.

“The truth of Healing Justice was always there,” Thompson said. “It was in my bones, it was in my cells and it was in my blood and it was in my sweat. It was in every tear I ever cried. It was always there, I just didn’t know it was named Healing Justice Project.”

Through healing retreats and support systems, Healing Justice helps people like Thompson to realize that they are not to blame and that their struggles have not been forgotten. It helps people like Broun to learn that their work is impacting the lives of so many beyond just their clients. And it helps people like Dudley to learn that they are not alone in their confusion and their anger, and that they have a system to not only get them on their feet, but to help them heal because, in the end, that’s what matters the most.

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Today, while driving his truck to no specific destination, Dudley thinks about the future he envisions. He wants to marry Miss Marilyn Johnson. He wants to put a new house on his sister’s lot. He wants to move on, to heal.

“Am I bitter? No. Was I bitter? Absolutely,” Dudley said. “I’m not angry because I don’t want to go back in prison. I’m free. And you know what? I can either live my life or let it just go in the sink.”

“I choose to live my life.”