STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA IN THE GENERAL COURTOF JUSTICE COUNTY OF WAKE SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION FILE, NO. 83 CRS 084695 STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA JAMES ANDREW BLACKMON, Defendant FEE EEE OEE ODED SORE EERE SSE EEE REPLY TO STATE’S RESPONSE TO THE COMMISSION TEER COE SOE aoneronntenaEeaieee James Blackmon is innocent. Mr. Blackmon did not stab Helena Payton, did not participate in her assault and was not even present on St. Augustine ‘s campus when Ms. Payton was fatally wounded. It is time to release Mr. Blackmon after more than thirty-five years of incarceration because innocent people should not be in North Carolina’s prisons. This tribunal’s only task is to determine whether Mr. Blackmon is innocent. Under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 154-1469 there is no requirement that this decision be based on newly discovered evidence. N.C. Gen. Sat. § 15A-1469(d) says the three- judge panel should consider all credible, verifiable evidence “even if consideredby a judge or a jury in a prior proceeding,” The issues in this case are not based on any legal claim, such as whether the defendant was competent at the time he made a statement or pled guilty or whether any piece of evidence was admissible. Unlike claims often made in ordinary post-conviction proceedings, such as issues involving ineffective assistance of counsel and Brady, there does not have to be a finding that a lawyer or police officer acted negligently or wrongly in the case. At this point, this panel’s sole responsibility is to review case de novo, and determine whether the man in custody is innocent. Mr. Blackmon must prove his innocence by clear and convincing evidence. This is a higher standard than by the preponderance of the evidence. Itis, however, not the highest standard of proof under the law. It is certainly a less stringent standard than beyond a reasonable doubt. See Scarborough v. Dillard's, 363 N.C. 715, 721 (2009) (“[The clear and convincing standard] is more exacting than the ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard generally applied to civil cases, but less than the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard applied in criminal cases.”) Although Defendant is not required to show any new evidence, there is information that was not known at the time of this plea that directlydemonstrates that Mr. Blackmon is innocent. During its investigation of this case, the Innocence Inquiry Commission discovered that an eyewitness had viewed a lineup in which Mr. Blackmon was included. She failed to identify him as being the person who killed Ms. Payton. A fingerprint in the bathroom stall where Ms. Payton was assaulted has been identified as belonging to a man with no reasonable explanation for why his print would be present there. The Innocence Commission's exhaustive investigation demonstrates that Mr. Blackmon was almost certainly not in Raleigh at all when Ms. Payton was stabbed. The only evidence against Mr. Blackmon comes from statements he made to the police during a series of interrogations during fall of 1983. There is absolutely nothing else connecting him to this crime. There is no physical evidence linking him to Ms. Payton’s death or to St. Augustine’s campus in 1979. There are no eye witnesses linking him to this crime. Mr. Blackmon has consistently denied an involvement in this offense for the 35 plus years since his arrest. Mr. Blackmon’s admissions to the police are completely unreliable. Mr. Blackmon is and was a severely mentally ill man. Decades of mental health records confirm that Mr. Blackmon suffers from schizoaffective disorder, whichcombines the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia with the mania of a person with bipolar disorder. Mr. Blackmon also has very low intellectual ability, and his 1Q has been measured on the WAIS as being as low as 69. During the period in which the police were interrogating him, Mr. Blackmon was going in and out of Dorothea Dix hospital. The officers involved in the interrogation say he was wearing a cape like Superman. Throughout the interrogations, most of which were recorded, Mr. Blackmon is clearly delusional. He talks about causing earthquakes and hurricanes. He compares himself to Dracula and says he has the ability to control people’s minds. Sometimes he starts singing and at other points starts speaking in what is described in the verbatim transcript as a foreign language or “mumbo jumbo.” We understand a lot more about false confessions today than we did back in 1988 when Mr. Blackmon entered his Alford plea. In the last twenty-five years, many people who confessed have been exonerated and there has been significant scientific research into the area of false confessions. Dr. Allison Redlich, a professor at George Mason University and an expert in the field of False Confessions, has found that Mr. Blackmon’s statements have many of the hallmarks of false confessions. People with severe mental illness or low intellectual ability are highly susceptible to giving false confessions. She notes 4that the detectives’ actions in this case made the situation even worse. Mr. Blackmon’s mental state made it a lot easier for them to manipulate him, and the police made him more vulnerable by constantly telling him they were his friends and using flattery. The police also incorporated Mr. Blackmon’s delusions into their questions. ‘Throughout the questioning, Mr. Blackmon constantly denied being involved in assaulting or killing anyone. His answers revealed that Mr. Blackmon did not know basic facts of this case. For example, he did not know whether the victim in the case was choked, cut or shot. Dr. Redlich notes that like many other cases involving false confessions, James Blackmon did not give the police any verifiable information about the crime that they did not already know before they began interrogating him. Also the police did not discover any new evidence as the result of their interrogation of Mr. Blackmon. Not only is there no reliable evidence that Mr. Blackmon assaulted Helena Payton, there is no reliable evidence that he was even in Raleigh when that crime happened. In fact, all of the reliable information suggests that he was in New York at the time. While Mr. Blackmon was born in the women’s prison in Raleigh in 1953 and lived in Lumberton as a child, by the time this crime happened he hadbeen living in New York for at least fifteen years. Records indicate that in 1979 he was living in Binghamton, New York. Mr. Blackmon was arrested for disorderly conduct the month before Helena Payton was murdered on September 28, 1979 and was arrested again in Binghamton for trespass on November 8, 1979. After an exhaustive search by investigators for the Innocence Inquiry Commission, they could not find any indication of Mr. Blackmon being anywhere in North Carolina as a teenager of an adult until the summer of 1980 when he filed for Social Security with a Lumberton address. There is no indication that he had been to Raleigh as an adult until being sent to Central Prison on a larceny charge in December of 1980, and then being released from prison to Dorothea Dix in 1981. There is no physical evidence linking Mr. Blackmon to Helena Payton’s death, to Latham Hall or to St. Augstine’s campus. The police did discover a knife and Dashiki that they believed were in the possession of the man who killed Ms. Payton. The Innocence Inquiry Commission attempted to find those items for testing but those items have either been lost or destroyed. DNA technology, as we know it today, did not exist when this case originally prosecuted. Therefore, these items were not tested to determine who might be responsible for Ms. Payton’s murder.The only forensic evidence in the case that still exists were fingerprints found in the bathroom stall where Ms. Payton was assaulted. None of those fingerprints belonged to James Blackmon. At the time of Mr. Blackmon’s plea, none of the fingerprints were identified. During the Innocence Inquiry Commission’s investigation, they had those prints compared to the data base of fingerprints. It was determined that fingerprint came from James Leach, who died in 2008. The Innocence Inquiry Commission conducted an exhaustive search to determine if there was any “innocent” reason why Mr. Leach’s fingerprints would have been in the women’s bathroom of a dorm on St. Augustine’s campus. They reviewed St. Augustine’s student records and found out that Mr. Leach had never been a student there. They reviewed employment records and determined that Mr. Leach has never been employed at St. Augustine. They interviewed Mr. Leach’s family, friends, and employers, and discovered that Mr. Leach had never worked for any place or person that would have resulted in him doing work on the St. Augustine’s campus. The Innocent Inquiry Commission interviewed women who lived on the floor, and discovered that if men came up to the floor, it was to see their girlfriends. From interviewing Leach’s friends and family, and from interviewing numerous women who lived on the sixth floor of Latham Hall {including at least one women in every room on that hall), they found that JamesLeach was not dating any woman on that floor. There is no innocent explanation for his prints being in that bathroom stall. No eyewitness has ever linked Mr. Blackmon to this case. In 1979, Jackie Kelly was living in Latham Hall when she heard Helena Payton scream. She saw the man who killed Helena Payton walk right past her. In 1983, Ms. Kelly was a solider stationed at Ft. Benning, Georgia. The Raleigh police brought Ms. Kelly from Ft. Benning to Raleigh to view a lineup. James Blackmon was one of the people in the lineup. Records from Dix hospital confirm that James Blackmon was going to lineup in October of 1983. Ms. Kelly told the officer conducting the lineup that the man who killed Ms. Payton was not present. The police told her that a man in the lineup had confessed to the killing. Ms. Kelly reiterated that the man who killed Ms. Payton was not in that lineup. The police never included an account of this lineup in their official reports of what happened. At the time of Mr. Blackmon’s plea, James Blackmon, his attorney Thomas Manning, the prosecutor William Hart and the judge all presumably did not know that the eyewitness in the case had excluded Mr. Blackmon as Helena Payton’s killer. When the Raleigh Police Department began investigating this case in 1979 they had a lot of suspects or persons of interest. But these initial persons ofinterest were all eliminated as suspects because their fingerprints were not found in the bathroom stall and because eyewitnesses like Jackie Kelly did not identify them. In 1983, the police decided to arrest James Blackmon even though his. prints did not match and he was excluded as the killer by an eyewitness. Thirty-five years later, we now know that Mr. Blackmon was not in Raleigh when Ms. Payton was killed. Because of our increased understanding of false confessions and mental illness, we know that Mr. Blackmon’s statements to the police are completely unreliable. This type of case is exactly why the North Carolina General Assembly passed Article 92 of the General Statues and created the Innocence Inquiry Commission. James Blackmon must be exonerated and immediately released from prison. He is innocent. Respectfully submitted this the [JT _ day of August, 2019. EMV Mary E. MeNeill (Beth) jon pl Jonathan . Broun Attorneys for Defenant North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services PO Box 25397 Raleigh, North Carolina 27611 Telephone: 919-856-2200 Fax: 919-856-2223CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE | certify that | served a copy of the foregoing Motion by first class mail or by hand delivery upon: N. Lorrin Freeman District Attorney Mark L. Stevens Assistant District Attorney Office of the District Attorney 10" Prosecutorial District P.O. Box 31 Raleigh, NC 27602 This the [}isday of August, 2019. Jonathan E. Broun 10