He spent 25 years in prison for a 1994 murder he didn’t commit. Police had the evidence absolving him in hand long before he was ever charged.
Dontae Sharpe’s long road
The anatomy and aftermath of a Wrongful Convictions Clinic exoneration
ontae Sharpe’s quest for freedom after being wrongfully convicted of a 1994 murder took a procedural path his lawyer calls “tortured.” But on Aug. 22, 2019, a judge in Greenville, N.C., found that newly discovered evidence presented on Sharpe’s behalf by the Duke Law Wrongful Convictions Clinic “destroys the State’s entire theory of the case” against him. As Sharpe’s lead counsel, Charles S. Rhyne Clinical Professor of Law Theresa Newman ’88, explained to the court, the state’s expert witness at trial testified in a way that she wouldn’t have if she had known the state’s theory of the case. If medical examiner Mary Gilliland had known the prosecution based its case on an eyewitness statement that Sharpe shot the victim while they were standing faceto-face, she would told prosecutors that account was “medically and scientifically impossible.” “It’s kind of a tiny pin to stand on, yet it truly unravels the entire case,” said Newman, who co-directs the Wrongful Convictions Clinic and has been working to free Sharpe since 2010. “At trial, Dr. Gilliland testified in a way that tacitly supported the state’s theory because she was testifying about medical evidence and did not know the state’s theory.”
Dontae Sharpe celebrates his release from wrongful incarceration, Aug. 22
Photo: Deborah Griffin/The Daily Reflector
42 Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2019
