It started with a phone call.
Dontae Sharpe applied for a job at a furniture store across the street from his mother’s house in Greenville, North Carolina, and called to follow up.
He didn’t have a work history. No credit. He just got out of prison after 24 years. He needed this job, or any job, for that matter.
“She heard my name and hung up the phone,” Sharpe said. “I didn’t know what it was, so I called back to make sure I wasn’t tripping. When I called back, as soon as she picked up, the lady who answered the phone said, ‘Who am I speaking with?’
“I said, ‘Montoyae Sharpe,’ and she hung up again,” he said.
Now, Sharpe works at Forward Justice as a leadership fellow, where he speaks with people in prison to help them through their situations. Co-founded by Caitlin Swain, one of Sharpe’s attorneys, the fellowship was meant to help him readjust back into society with secure housing and a job. The nonprofit works on voting rights and changing procedures and policies in the prison system, with a bail bond set aside for wrongful convictions.
His desire to work with incarcerated people stems from his experiences with the judicial system.
In 1995, Sharpe was convicted for the murder of 33-year-old George Radcliffe, who had been found dead in his Mazda pickup truck from a gunshot wound in Greenville.
Police interviewed 14-year-old Charlene Johnson, who testified that she saw Sharpe shoot Radcliffe after being slighted in a drug deal. This testimony contained a flaw: How did Radcliffe end up in his truck?
Johnson amended her statement, saying that Sharpe and Mark Joyner, a man she allegedly saw Sharpe with, moved Radcliffe’s body into his truck and fled the scene.
Johnson’s testimony didn’t add up. In Radcliffe’s wallet, there was $53 — a significantly higher amount than the $20 she said the cocaine cost. Johnson also had a history of drug use and mental illness. Other statements corroborated with her words, but the scene wasn’t correct, according to a medical examiner. The bullet didn’t enter face-to-face like she said: It traveled from side-to-side. The truck was positioned into a U-turn, which wouldn’t be possible because the driver was said to be deceased. There was no forensic evidence tying Sharpe to the murder.
At 19, Sharpe was sentenced to life in prison. Johnson recanted her testimony months after the trial ended, but it was too late. Twenty-seven years later, he is still paying the price for a false testimony..
Wrongful conviction has catastrophic effects on the lives of those imprisoned, as well as the lives of their loved ones. Someone like Sharpe, who spent more than half his life incarcerated, never had a chance to build relationships with his brothers’ families, and the existing relationships he had were fragmented over time. His family suffers the consequences, too, as the label of “murderer” and “convict” stabs into Sharpe’s name, sharp and thorn-like.
According to The National Registry of Exonerations, there have been 3,066 exonerations in the United States since 1989. This totals up to more than 26,900 years lost in the prison system, which wrongfully convicted individuals cannot get back, no matter the amount of financial compensation.
It started with a phone call, and it never ends with a phone call. In the U.S., formerly incarcerated people face unemployment rates of 27 percent on average, according to 2018 data from the Prison Policy Initiative. Stigma sticks onto these individuals as the media gathers information on their cases. News spreads. Ghosts emerge from their former lives.
Sharpe lived in Greenville before his conviction, a city with a 38.8 percentage of Black or African American people. Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons almost five times as much as white Americans, according to 2021 data from The Sentencing Project.
Sharpe and his family have faced a culmination of these consequences throughout the past 27 years. Its impacts are like a barely-healed scab, peeled and picked at until the bleeding flesh is revealed underneath.
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Sarah Blakely and Sharon Sharpe, Sharpe’s mother and aunt, came to visit every weekend unless the visitation day was on a weekday. Then, they’d visit on weekdays. His mother missed only three or four visits over 24 years.
“They believed me from the beginning, because they know me. They knew me,” Sharpe said. “Me and my mom talked about everything. That’s how she raised me, and my other brothers, to always talk to her about stuff.”
Blakely remembers the day Sharpe called her when he was arrested.
“He said to me, ‘Ma, I don’t care what nobody else believe, as long as you believe me and know that I haven’t killed anyone,’” she said. “And I knew he hadn’t, and I knew if he had, he would have said it. He would have owned up to it.”
His mother remembers him as her smart son, her “little professor,” she said she used to call him. Her inquisitive son. The one the teachers loved.
Now, both Sharpe and Blakely have to rebuild the strong relationship they once had. Instead of seeing her son every week during visitation hours, she can see him in-person. She can grasp her hands in his and see how they’ve both changed throughout the years. But, truly, she needs to learn how to see her son as a grown man, not the 10, 15, 19-year-old boy she once knew.
The visits were a change of pace. Sharpe would get up every morning, “hate to get up,” he said, and study his Bible before rushing to the bathroom, where 15 other men would soon be fighting over the five available sinks. Breakfast, work, lunch, church, school, dinner. The same thing each and every day.
“You had to find things to do, productive things, because if you didn’t, the devil gonna find something for you to do, and you’re gonna be in trouble,” he said. “Segregation, fights, all kinds of crazy stuff. You had to be your own man and make your own decisions and make your own plan for every day — sometimes every minute of the day — because if you slip, you’re gonna get swallowed up by the system, by the way life feels in there.”
Through the turmoil of prison, Sharpe found solace in God. He grew up in a religious household. He didn’t need to continue with his faith, but chose to after being convicted.
In John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”
“I wanted to see if were real, for real,” he said. “To see if he could show me, help me become a better man even though I was in that situation, and not let this situation destroy me like I’ve seen it do to so many other people that were guilty or innocent.”
In some ways, it worked. Sharpe prayed that his innocence would be acknowledged and was exonerated on Aug. 22, 2019.
But by placing his faith in God, he had to work through his hatred toward the people who aided in his conviction. He felt unimaginable anger any time he heard their names in conversations with his lawyers and mother. Years went by. The anger boiled, simmered and halted to a stop. Sharpe points to his belief in God to his freedom, to his groundedness.
Though he worked to change his mindset, Sharpe still wasn’t prepared for the world outside of wired fences and strict, unfaltering regulations. He wasn’t ready to see how fragmented families had become — including his own.
Frank Baumgartner, a distinguished professor in the Department of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, said that when in prison, where the rules of life are different, individuals learn how to survive on the inside.
There is a Rip Van Winkle effect when people are in prison for a long period of time. If someone goes to prison at age 20 and leaves at age 50, they have essentially passed by an entire generation.
“There’s just so many challenges for people — we take away so many of their years that naturally, they’re going to have to make a number of adjustments and many of those things can never come back,” Baumgartner said. “They lose their own family. They lose connection with people.”
Though Sharpe has forgiven and chosen to move on with his life, incarceration left imprints of ripples on his family.
“When I got pictures — one of my younger brothers had a son, another had a daughter, another one had a son and a daughter — I cried, because I was brought back to reality,” he said.
Sharpe compares prison to a time warp: a twilight zone where life moves at a cruel, slow pace, whereas people live in the fast lane outside of incarceration. He visits his mom in Greenville at least once a month, but sometimes he doesn’t want to enter that house and see the gray in her hair, to feel the shock every time he realizes how much she’s aged. Sharpe remembers her as the mother she was when he was 10, 15, 19. One hour visits weren’t enough to catch each wrinkle on her face.
His conviction caused his mother and three brothers to move houses as rumors spread about his case. Kids who were friends with Sharpe’s brothers didn’t want to play with them anymore. His mother’s friends stopped talking to her. She couldn’t get a job for a while, he said, because nobody knew whether he was innocent.
“I didn’t even know how bad it affected them, because my brother started telling me a little bit about how they had to leave school, and how they’d then get into fights a lot in school because people making comments and approaching them and saying stuff,” he said. “I didn’t even know they went through that much.”
Reconnecting after prison was unfamiliar territory. His family hadn’t been together in the flesh other than the weekly visits or phone calls. They had to relearn each other, Sharpe said. What happened while he was gone? What were their kids like?
Some relationships will take more time. Blakely’s youngest son was close to Sharpe before his conviction and saw him as a hero.
“It’s like they’re strangers,” she said.
It took, and continues to take, commitment from both sides. As his relatives reach out to him, he reciprocates, like an outstretched hand grasping at another.
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In a Pitt County courtroom on Aug. 22, 2019, Sharpe recalls being surrounded by his brothers, aunts, cousins, family members and close friends as the judge ordered his release. He threw his arms into the air, smiling out of relief and pure joy as his loved ones cheered in the background.
“It was a moment of relief, but also a moment of fear, too, because I didn’t know what to expect, and it was shock,” he said. “I’m just getting thrust back into society, which I was glad I was.”
Also, on Nov. 12, 2021, Gov. Roy Cooper granted Sharpe a pardon of innocence, making him able to claim up to $750,000 in state compensation for his wrongful conviction.
Sharpe moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, into the tight-knit community of Oakhurst after staying with his mother in Greenville for a few months after his release. The neighborhood is highly sought after for its fair rent and comfortable living, and in April, the first green fingers of spring bring the area’s foliage to life. Amidst the metropolitan fervor, there are environments being built and rebuilt. Lives uprooted and replanted.
“There were so many ghosts in Greenville from my case and everywhere I went,” he said, a reason why he decided to move to Charlotte.
There’s another reason why he moved, too.
Wanda Carmon met Sharpe in Greenville, where they lived in the same neighborhood. Before his conviction, they were close. They even had a daughter together.
Imani Carmon remembers going to the courtroom with her children on the day of her father’s exoneration.
“He kind of looked at me like I was still young,” she said. “I feel like he still does that. He wanted me to stay the night with him when he first got out. We were still trying to build that relationship, but I feel like we were rushing things instead of trying to learn each other.”
Carmon said her relationship with her father is “rocky,” at best. They both have a stubborn streak. For Carmon, it feels like he doesn’t listen to her because he’s the parental figure.
There are years of things unspoken, simply because he wasn’t there to hear them while she was growing up. They communicate, butt heads and withdraw, choosing to lay low instead of letting the conversation explode.
But, Carmon wants to build that relationship with him — she just wants to “be heard,” she said, and have him understand her perspective.
Wanda Carmon wanted to visit Sharpe when he was in prison, but he wanted her to move on with her life. She always wanted him to have a relationship with their daughter, but said it wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t there to establish it.
The weekend Sharpe was exonerated, Carmon went back to Greenville to see him. Now, they’re thinking about getting married. From 19 to 47, he’s changed from a boy to a man, she said, but he’s still stubborn in the ways she remembers.
Though her daughter and Sharpe are working on their relationship,“I finally have my family I always wanted,” Carmon said.
Blakely wants her son to be happy. She wants him to experience all the things that were taken away from him — his young adult years, his relationships and his place in society.
“I really want him to be happy,” she said.
In a diner in Charlotte, there are glimpses of that happiness. Carmon and Sharpe recently finished moving all their belongings into their new home in Matthews, North Carolina. Carmon scrolls on her phone, looking for new furniture.
“He used to live in an apartment in Durham for a year after he got out,” she said. “I used to visit him every Saturday — every weekend. I wanted to see if we still liked each other.”
Sharpe nudges her with his elbow, a fond smile on his face.
“Every weekend,” she said.
