Man's Pandemic Relief Funds Helped Him Clear His Name and Reputation of Murder
The legal system has criminals that violate morality, people and society
Ricky Dority is a free man and life is so much better, despite the trauma inflicted on him by the police and judicial and prison system.
Once serving a life in prison sentence at Oklahoma’s Joseph Harp Correctional Center for a murder he long claimed he didn’t commit, Dority, after more than twenty years, has liberty and a cleansed reputation.
His long, overdue victory was jumpstarted by receiving and deciding to spend his pandemic relief funds to hire a private investigator to get the state’s attention, reports Sean Murphy at the Associated Press.
“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 account of a 1997 cold-case killing, and Dority’s conviction was vacated in June by a Sequoyah County judge,” Murphy wrote.
The now 65-year-old Dority lives a quiet life in Arkansas, one he greatly appreciates.
“If you’re gone for a lot of years, you don’t take it for granted anymore,” he told Murphy.
Did you know that, according to statistics reported by Murphy that, “Dority is one of nearly 3,400 people who have been exonerated across the country since 1989, mostly over murder convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.”
The reason for the errors and misconduct, range from or involve “overworked defense attorneys, shoddy forensic work, overzealous prosecutors and outdated investigative techniques,” Murphy reported.
“I thought I was clear because I knew I didn’t have anything do with that murder,” Dority said. “But they tried me for it and found me guilty of it.”
An interesting note in the story is that the person Dority hired, Bobby Staton, usually investigated insurance fraud, not murder convictions, but Staton accepted the case, saw the problems with it and “went to the Oklahoma Innocence Project, which assigned a law student, Abby Brawner, to help investigate,” Murphy wrote.
An investigator working outside their area of expertise, a law student and likely big odds of Dority getting good news from them. But it happened.
The informant in the maximum-security Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, and recanted his statement implicating Dority. That informant also “didn’t live at the home where he told investigators Dority showed up in bloody clothes,” Murphy reported, adding that, “When the actual homeowner testified at a hearing this summer, the judge dismissed the case.”
While an office of the legal system doesn’t yet want to give up on investigating further through the use of DNA, Dority does have another ally, Murphy reported.
“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 a witness ‘was not credible.’
“The last thing I want to see is an innocent person in prison for a crime they didn’t commit,” Dunn said. “Because that means the person who actually did commit the crime, or those persons, are still out there.”
Dority shakes his head at his experience and knows for certain that he isn’t the only one who was a victim of a state-led crime.
“After they’ve done what they’ve done to me, I know there are people in that prison who are innocent that need to be out and need help getting out,” Dority asserted.
“If they hadn’t gotten me out, I’d have been in there for the rest of my life.”
Michael Toebe is a reputation consultant, advisor and communications specialist at Reputation Quality, assisting individuals and organizations with further building reputation as an asset or ethically protecting, restoring or reconstructing it.
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