An Oklahoma man serving a life sentence in prison used his pandemic relief funds to hire a private investigator to help exonerate him of a 1997 murder he did not commit.
As other inmates cashed their COVID checks for the police station, Ricky Dority, 65, struggled to prove his innocence, according to reports.
Bobby Staton, who normally investigated insurance fraud, took on the case and realized it was “riddled with holes,” the Associated Press reported.
She eventually teamed up with law student Abby Brawner of Oklahoma City University’s Innocence Project to delve deeper into the case.
In 2014, investigators opened the cold case murder of 28-year-old Mitchell Nixon, who was found beaten to death in Oklahoma in October 1997.
Since his conviction was overturned in June, Ricky Dority has been able to enjoy life in the sprawling Arkansas River Valley as a free man.
Another man who ended up pleading guilty to manslaughter in the slaying implicated Dority, who was in federal prison at the time on a firearms conviction.
During the trial, a police informant said Dority changed out of bloody clothes in her home the night of the murder. Dority was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
But Staton and Brawner discovered that the informant didn’t actually live at the house where he said Dority arrived that night. When the real owner testified in June, the judge dismissed the case.
An investigator and students from Oklahoma City University’s Oklahoma Innocence Project found inconsistencies in the 1997 case, and Dority’s conviction was overturned in June. UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Now, Dority enjoys life on her son’s 5-acre property near the Arkansas River Valley, where she spends her time feeding the chickens and playing with her grandchildren.
“Having done what they did to me, I know there are innocent people in that prison who need to get out and who need help getting out,” Dority told the AP. “If they hadn’t taken me out, I would have been in there the rest of my life.
Dority is one of nearly 3,400 people who have been exonerated nationwide since 1989, at least 46 of them in Oklahoma.
With postal cables
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Source: vtt.edu.vn