Dontae Sharpe: Wrongful Conviction, Exoneration, and Pardon

The Dontae Sharpe wrongful conviction is the case of a North Carolina man who spent more than 24 years in prison for a 1994 murder he did not commit, convicted at 19 on the testimony of a 14-year-old witness who later recanted and freed in 2019 after a medical examiner testified that the prosecution’s version of the shooting was scientifically impossible. Governor Roy Cooper granted Sharpe a full pardon of innocence on November 12, 2021.¹

The Murder and the Teenage Witness

On February 11, 1994, George Radcliffe, a white man, was found shot dead in his Mazda pickup truck in Greenville, North Carolina. The truck had rolled into a chain-link fence. An autopsy showed a single bullet had entered Radcliffe’s upper left arm and traveled in a straight line through his upper torso to his upper right arm, consistent with a shot fired while he was seated in the truck with his arms held tight against his sides.²

Two months later, police picked up Charlene Johnson, a 14-year-old girl, on an unrelated matter. Officers questioned her without a parent, guardian, or attorney present. She told them she had seen a man she called “Donta” argue with a white man over a two-dollar shortage on a crack cocaine purchase, shoot the man face-to-face, drive the truck into the fence, and throw away the gun and keys.² Sharpe, then 19, was charged with first-degree murder.

The 1995 Trial

Sharpe was convicted in Pitt County Superior Court on July 24, 1995, and sentenced to life in prison.³ The state’s case rested on Johnson, now 15, who described the face-to-face shooting from the witness stand. A second witness, Beatrice Stokes, said she saw Sharpe talking to Radcliffe but did not see any shooting.⁴ No forensic evidence tied Sharpe to the crime.⁵

The jury also never heard a piece of evidence pointing away from Sharpe. Tracy Highsmith was prepared to testify that her boyfriend, Damien Smith, had confessed to killing Radcliffe and told her he “would kill himself before he’d go to jail for killing a white man.” Smith died by suicide 27 days after the murder. The trial judge excluded Highsmith’s account as hearsay, and Sharpe’s defense attorney did not argue that Smith’s confession qualified as a statement against penal interest, an established exception to the hearsay rule.⁶

The Recantation That Went Nowhere

Weeks after the trial, Johnson recanted. She said she had lied on the stand and had only arrived at the scene after the shooting. She would hold to that recantation for the rest of the case, later reaffirming to investigators during a reinvestigation that her trial testimony had been fabricated.²

A 1997 hearing on the recantation was held before Pitt County Superior Court Judge W. Russell Duke Jr., who found Johnson’s original testimony truthful and rejected her disavowal.⁷ Judge Duke would hear Sharpe’s post-conviction motions repeatedly over the next two decades, ruling against him each time. Sharpe’s lead attorney later said the false evidence presented at the 1997 hearing, combined with Judge Duke’s rulings, “truly tainted all of Mr. Sharpe’s efforts the next 22 years.”²

Throughout his imprisonment, Sharpe turned down plea offers that would have shortened his sentence because accepting them would have required a confession.⁸

The Medical Evidence That Broke the Case

In 2010, the Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke University School of Law took on Sharpe’s case, with co-director Theresa Newman as lead counsel and supervising attorney Jamie Lau on the team. The reinvestigation stretched nearly a decade.²

The turning point came when the clinic interviewed Dr. Mary Gilliland, the medical examiner who had testified at trial. Gilliland told them she had never been shown the prosecution’s theory of a face-to-face shooting. Had she known, she said, she would have told the jury it was “medically and scientifically impossible” for the bullet to have followed the path it did if the two men had been facing each other. The autopsy showed Radcliffe was shot while seated with his arms at his sides, flatly inconsistent with Johnson’s account.²

A 2014 motion presenting the innocence evidence was assigned to Judge Duke, who summarily denied it on his final day on the bench in February 2016 without holding an evidentiary hearing and without responding to three requests from Newman to meet about the case.⁹

Release in 2019

In June 2018, the clinic filed a new 344-page Motion for Appropriate Relief presenting Gilliland’s testimony and evidence of a confession to the murder by another person who had since died. This time the case was assigned to Wake County Superior Court Judge Bryan Collins, sitting in Pitt County.²

At a hearing on August 22, 2019, Gilliland testified that the state’s account of the shooting was scientifically impossible. Judge Collins ruled from the bench that the new evidence “destroys the State’s entire theory of the case” and ordered Sharpe released on a $100,000 bond pending a new trial. The assistant district attorney immediately moved to dismiss all charges, citing a lack of evidence, and the Pitt County District Attorney’s office declined to seek a new trial.⁵ Judge Collins later concluded that Johnson’s trial testimony had been “entirely made up.”¹⁰

Sharpe walked out of prison that day after more than 24 years behind bars.

The Pardon and Compensation

Release did not clear Sharpe’s record or open the door to state compensation. Under North Carolina law, a wrongfully convicted person seeking compensation must first obtain either a pardon of innocence from the governor or an exoneration through the state’s Innocence Inquiry Commission.¹¹ The pardon application took more than two years. Newman later called the fight for the pardon “harder than the 26-year fight” to overturn the conviction itself.¹²

On November 12, 2021, Governor Cooper granted the pardon, saying he had “carefully reviewed” the case and that “Mr. Sharpe and others who have been wrongly convicted deserve to have that injustice fully and publicly acknowledged.”¹ The pardon made Sharpe eligible to apply for compensation of up to $750,000 under North Carolina law, which pays $50,000 for each year of wrongful incarceration up to that cap. Payments are administered through the North Carolina Industrial Commission.¹³

Sharpe said the pardon delivered something money could not: “You get a peace of mind and you get a weight lifted off the shoulder… from carrying around that burden of people still looking at you like you might be a murderer.”⁵ He also spoke about the bureaucracy: “I don’t understand how you can know somebody’s innocent and still have all this red tape. The system seems set up to try to discourage you.”¹⁴

Why It Took So Long

Sharpe’s legal team pointed to a series of prosecutorial failures. Johnson, the state’s central witness, was a 14-year-old described by the defense as emotionally and psychologically troubled and previously admitted to a psychiatric facility. Police questioned her without a parent or attorney. Her trial testimony differed substantially from her written statement, and she used the word “probably” repeatedly on the stand.²

More fundamentally, the clinic argued that the state had scientific evidence within three days of the murder that contradicted the story Johnson would later tell. Newman said the prosecution “should have stopped on April 7, 1994, the day Ms. Johnson gave the statement.”² The lead police investigator himself later acknowledged that Sharpe had been convicted on “dubious evidence.”⁵

The case also fit a documented pattern. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, innocent Black people are roughly seven times more likely than innocent white people to be wrongfully convicted of murder. Among Black people exonerated for murder, 31 percent were convicted of killing white victims, though only about 15 percent of murders by African Americans involve white victims. Exonerations for Black murder defendants take an average of 14.2 years, compared with 11.2 years for white defendants.¹⁵

Life After Prison

In January 2020, Sharpe joined Forward Justice, a Durham-based law and policy organization, as a R.I.S.E. (Returning in Service and Excellence) Fellow. He has spoken publicly about the difficulty of finding livable-wage work in Pitt County after release, about restoring his voting rights, and about the broader reentry struggles exonerees face. In February 2020 he addressed the Historic Thousands on Jones Street march in Raleigh. He has said he plans to continue the advocacy work “the rest of my life,” adding: “It didn’t take two days to get like this, so it’s not gonna take just two days to get it right.”⁸

1
The Charlotte Observer. Dontae Sharpe Pardoned
2
Duke Law. Dontae Sharpe’s Long Road
3
Findlaw. Sharpe v. Bell
4
The Daily Reflector. DA’s Office Details Decision in Sharpe Case
5
ABC11. Dontae Sharpe Pardon
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Slate. Dontae Sharpe Is Not a Murderer
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WCTI12. 25 Years Later, Convicted Murderer Maintains Innocence
8
Facing South. Dontae Sharpe’s Deeply Personal Fight to Change the Criminal Justice System
9
The Daily Reflector. Duke Release Offers More Details on Sharpe Case
10
The New York Times. North Carolina Pardon and Compensation
11
Carolina Journal. Our Wrongful Conviction Compensation System Needs Reform
12
WAAY-TV. He Was Wrongly Convicted of Murder as a Teen
13
Innocence Project. Exoneree Compensation in North Carolina
14
Duke Law. Thankful Sharpe and Family Celebrate His Pardon of Innocence at Duke Law
15
Facing South. Campaign to Free Dontae Sharpe Highlights South’s Wrongful Conviction Crisis