Lorrin Freeman

Wake County District Attorney

Overzealous Prosecutors
Prosecutors hold extraordinary discretionary power in the American justice system. How they exercise their discretion is
the difference between fairness and corruption; between justice and inequality; between a community that has faith in
its justice system and the lawlessness that occurs when it does not.

Lorrin Freeman, District Attorney for Wake County, North Carolina, which is home to over one million people and
encompasses Raleigh, wields tremendous power. Freeman has used that power to deny the existence of racial disparities
in the criminal justice system, seek the execution of people struggling with profound mental illness, and to fight to keep
an innocent man in prison.

“No differences in the way
whites and non-whites were
processed in the courts
from charging to conviction
and sentencing”
That’s a head-scratching conclusion from a “study” that Lorrin Freeman
wrote about North Carolina’s criminal legal system. Freeman wrote that
one “obvious” explanation for that finding is that “there is no disparate
treatment of offenders based on race in the criminal justice system.”
Researchers from the University of North Carolina, Duke, and Michigan
State have all published separate peer-reviewed studies finding racial bias
in North Carolina’s criminal justice system. Moreover, in 2020, Governor
Roy Cooper, acknowledging the presence of racial bias in the state’s
criminal justice system, formed a 24-member task force chaired by a North
Carolina Supreme Court justice and the North Carolina Attorney General to
find solutions that address the racial bias that Freeman said didn’t exist.

"Undeniable outrageousness"
Freeman’s District Attorney’s Office obtained a conviction against a man
who, as the North Carolina Court of Appeals summarized it, “knowingly
possessed five stolen video games and sold those video games to a pawn shop
for $12.” Then, Freeman’s office successfully sought to have the man
sentenced to a 9-and-a-half to 12-and-a-half year prison sentence based
on the fact that he already had a criminal record. The North Carolina Court
of Appeals highlighted the “undeniable outrageousness of incarcerating him
for, at a minimum, the better part of a decade for knowingly possessing five
stolen video games.” The Court also called the sentence that Freeman’s
office obtained “grossly disproportionate”. Nonetheless, Freeman continues
to fight to uphold the conviction.

Fighting to keep an James Blackmon is a 68-year-old Black man who is intellectually impaired
and struggles with schizophrenia so severe that when the police accused
innocent man in prison
him of a murder that he did not commit, “during police interrogations, he
sometimes wore a Superman-like cape, compared himself to Dracula and said
he could cause earthquakes and hurricanes.” A jury ultimately convicted
Blackmon of the murder based on little more than a “coerced confession”

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 obtained by police detectives who leveraged Blackmon’s lack of intellectual
prowess and impaired mental state against him. In 2012, new evidence
emerged. First, it turns out that Blackmon almost certainly didn’t live in
North Carolina until after the murder took place. He was arraigned in a
court in New York on a minor charge the month before the murder
occurred and had a charge dismissed in court in New York the month after
the murder happened. Second, there was a fingerprint found at the scene
which, when tested, matched an alternative suspect with a lengthy criminal
record. Nonetheless, Freeman fought for years to keep Blackmon in
prison. Freeman argued Blackmon had not proved his innocence, but the
North Carolina Innocence Commission disagreed and in 2018 voted
unanimously that there was sufficient evidence of his innocence. The next
year, Blackmon was exonerated and awarded state compensation.

Breeding a culture of Freeman has pursued only one prosecution for police brutality while
repeatedly refusing to prosecute officers who seriously injure or kill
police impunity
civilians. For example, a Raleigh police officer killed a man suspected of
stealing a cell phone by firing 11 rounds at him while he was trying to get
away from the officer. The officer, who failed to turn on his body camera,
said that the man was wielding a knife. The state crime lab, however, did
not find any fingerprints matching the man on the knife. Moreover, the
man was 20 feet away from the officer, and did not pose an imminent
threat. Freeman issued a statement exonerating the officer. The one case
Freeman did prosecute involved two state troopers and a Wake County
Sheriff’s deputy beating a homeless man with flashlights and allowing their
police dog to bite the man. The man died a year later, at least in part due to
the injuries he sustained in the beating. One of the state troopers can be
heard on audio recordings encouraging the other officers to hit Hinton in
the head with a flashlight. But Freeman pursued the most minor charges
imaginable against the officer and allowed him to plead guilty and avoid
any jail time.

Why is Freeman so willing One reason might be Freeman’s cozy relationship with the police union.
The North Carolina Police Benevolent Association endorsed Freeman when
to turn a blind eye to
she ran for re-election as clerk of court in 2010, and then endorsed her and
police officers who kill made a significant donation when she first ran for District Attorney. In turn,
civilians? Freeman ran campaign ads that screamed “Endorsed by POLICE,” and served
as a master of ceremonies for the police union’s annual banquet. Yet, when
Freeman pursued even the most lenient charges against the officers who
senselessly beat a homeless man with a flashlight, the union publicly
chastised her.

The most bloodthirsty Despite presiding over a prosecutor’s office in one of the most progressive
counties in North Carolina, a state where only 25% of voters prefer the
prosecutor in North
death penalty over other sentencing options, Lorrin Freeman has
Carolina prosecuted more death penalty trials than any of the other 41
prosecutors in North Carolina over the same time period that she’s been in
office. Even though Wake County juries rejected a death sentence on nine
straight occasions, Freeman kept seeking death and finally got a jury to
hand her down a death sentence in 2019, the first death sentence in North
Carolina in three years--a state in which no one has been executed for
more than 15 years.

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Seeking to execute the A 2019 poll from Public Policy Polling in North Carolina found that a
supermajority of voters in North Carolina (68%) support a ban on executing
profoundly mentally ill
people who are severely mentally ill. But that has not stopped Freeman
from seeking to execute people with severe mental illness. For example,
Freeman sought death against Kendrick Gregory, a man diagnosed with
schizophrenia who had been hospitalized at least 20 times for mental
illness, including for hearing voices that told him to harm himself. Experts
described Mr. Gregory as “acutely psychotic” while the prosecution was
pending, so much so that he wouldn’t bathe and could not communicate
with his lawyers.

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