Attorneys for two Winston-Salem men who served lengthy prisons sentences for the 2002 murder of NBA star Chris Paul’s grandfather is asking a judge to dismiss their clients’ convictions.
The attorneys are also asking a judge to order prosecutors to dismiss charges against their clients and order the Forsyth County District attorney’s Office to respond to their motion and schedule an evidentiary hearing for Christopher Bryant and Jermal Tolliver.
Bradley Bannon and Trisha Pande, both of Chapel Hill, and S. Mark Rabil of Winston-Salem filed the motion for Bryant and Tolliver Thursday in Forsyth Superior Court.
“We got grounds for relief,” Bannon said Friday. “I don’t file claims that are frivolous. We absolutely believe that there are grounds for this constitutional error.”
Rabil, Tolliver’s attorney, agreed with Bannon, saying, “we have strong claims for relief based not only on new evidence but the basic unfairness of the 2002 police investigation and the 2005 trial.”
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District attorney Jim O’Neill disagreed with the attorneys for Bryant and Tolliver, saying that the state’s appellate courts have rejected their clients’ claims.
“At some point, our courts and our legislature must intervene and put an end to these endless motions and claims of innocence,” O’Neill said. “The victims and their family must have peace, at some point.”
The legal filing for Bryant and Tolliver happened two months after the attorneys for two other Winston-Salem men — Rayshawn Denard Banner and Nathaniel Arnold Cauthen — filed similar motions for their clients, saying that DNA evidence points to an unidentified perpetrator in the case.
Banner, 35, and Cauthen, 36, who are brothers, are serving life imprisonment in connection with Nathaniel Jones’ death.
Three other men — Dorrell Brayboy, Bryant and Tolliver — were convicted of second-degree murder and common law robbery in a separate trial and released from prison in 2017 and 2018. Brayboy was stabbed to death a year after he was released.
Bryant and Tolliver, both 36, were incarcerated in the Forsyth County Jail and state prisons for 17 years and 10 months before they were released, according to Bannon and the N.C. Division of Adult Correction.
Attorneys who represent criminal defendants who have served prison sentences for alleged wrongful convictions must challenge their clients’ convictions, Bannon said. That is the case with Bryant and Tolliver, he said.
Nathaniel Jones, 61, was attacked in November 2002 in the carport of his home at 905 Moravia St. During the incident, his hands were bound behind his back and his mouth taped over, according to court papers.
In his book, “Sixty-One: Life Lessons From Papa, On and Off the Court,” Paul wrote about his experiences working at his grandfather’s Chevron gas station when Paul was growing up.
Jones’ Chevron gas station was located on New Walkertown Road near its intersection with Carver School Road. Paul, who was 17 when Jones died, has said that his grandfather was the first Black man to own a Chevron gas station in North Carolina.
Banner, Cauthen, Bryant and Tolliver filed claims with the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission. Banner, Cauthen, Bryant, Tolliver and Brayboy were teenagers when Jones died.
In March 2020, the commission board members held a five-day hearing and determined that there was sufficient evidence to support that the four men could be innocent.
In a hearing held two years later at the Forsyth County Hall of Justice, the four men argued that Winston-Salem police coerced them into making false confessions in a case where no definitive physical evidence, including fingerprints and DNA, tied them to the crime scene.
The men also said police threatened them with the death penalty, even though juveniles can’t get that punishment, and used other methods to persuade them to make false confessions.
In April 2022, a three-judge panel denied the innocence claims of the four men, ruling they didn’t provide their claims with clear and convincing evidence.
“During the interrogations of our 14- to 15-year old cognitively impaired clients, some officers threatened the use of the death penalty, a punishment that was unconstitutional at the time, to induce false confessions,” said Rabil, the director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic at the Wake Forest University School of Law.
In court papers, Bannon and Pande argued that the constitutional rights of Bryant and Tolliver were violated by their convictions.
Bryant and Tolliver falsely confessed to participating in the attack on Jones that led to his death, according to court papers.
DNA evidence has excluded the teenagers in the crime. The motion also points to Jessica Black, the prosecutor’s key witness, who has repeatedly recanted her testimony.
Black, who was 16 when Jones died, has provided new evidence establishing an alibi for several of the teenage boys. Black, now 37, says that the boys were not all together when Jones was robbed and killed.
Black testified in two trials that some of the boys had talked about robbing Jones and that she heard the attack while sitting at a picnic table in Belview Park about 100 yards from the crime scene.
Black says that police interrogation led to her providing false testimony, according to court papers.
“The five young men who were wrongly charged and convicted are victims in a long line of injustice in certain cases in Winston-Salem,” Rabil said.
Bryant and Tolliver also received ineffective assistance of counsel from their trial attorneys, according to their motion.
The trial attorneys, Nils Gerber and Clark Fischer, failed to investigate Bryant’s and Tolliver’s educational and psychological background or have them evaluated for intellectual disability and cognitive impairment, according to court papers.
“I haven’t read the pleading,” Gerber said Friday about the motion for Bryant and Tolliver. “I know I did not render ineffective assistance of counsel.”
“Mr. Bryant was charged with first-degree murder, and he wasn’t convicted of first-degree murder,” Gerber said.
The N.C. Court of Appeals and the state Innocence Inquiry Commission have reviewed the case, and “(I) would defer to those judgments,” Fischer said.
jhinton@wsjournal.com
336-727-7299
@jhintonWSJ
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