The Case of Ronnie Long: 44 Years in US Prison for a Crime He Didn’t Commit
Ronnie Long, a black man from the US, has finally received compensation amounting to US$25,000,000 for the forty-four years he spent in prison for a crime he did not commit. Long was convicted of robbery and rape in 1976, but evidence was later found to have been hidden during his trial. Along with the compensation, Long also received a formal apology from the US city where he was prosecuted.
The case has gained renewed attention after the city of Concord, North Carolina issued a public apology on its official website last Tuesday. The statement read, “Errorly, he served a sentence of forty-four years, three months and seventeen days in prison for a crime that he did not commit.”
Long was released in 2020 at the age of sixty-five, after being convicted at the age of twenty-one. According to CBS News, Long had claimed over the years that the jury was made up entirely of white people and hand-picked by Cabarrus County police officers.
Throughout his time in prison, Long was able to prove that over forty fingerprints from the crime scene that did not match his were never produced at trial. He also claimed that semen samples that were never shared with the defense and later disappeared. As a result of these irregularities and a review of the case, Long was eventually released in 2020.
Long was first awarded compensation of US$750,000, the maximum allowed by law for wrongful convictions, and later received a payment of US$3,000,000 from the State Bureau of Investigation. Now, with the additional US$25,000,000 in compensation, Long has finally received some form of justice after spending forty-four years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.