Despite a federal jury acquitting Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne for the murder of a Virginia police officer nearly 25 years ago, the two men remain in prison for the crime. But with new evidence and a new lawyer, they're hoping to reverse the fraught, state-level guilty pleas that a federal judge later relied on to sentence them both to life behind bars.

Richardson and Claiborne's plight is as unique as it is complex. Since they were accused in April 1998 of shooting and killing Officer Allen Gibson, they've faced charges in both the state and federal court systems, and seen their cases go up and down on appeal while seeming to skirt some of the judicial system's most basic rules regarding double jeopardy and the disclosure of exculpatory evidence.

Despite state prosecutors initially charging them with capital murder, the charges were drastically reduced thanks to what court records say was a lack of physical evidence. The two men ultimately pled guilty in 1999 to manslaughter and accessory after the fact, and served little to no time in prison.

Federal prosecutors, however, went on to try them again for the same killing under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in 2001. In the federal trial, jurors found Richardson and Claiborne not guilty of the murder, but did convict them on drug possession and distribution charges.

Even though they were cleared of the murder, the federal judge overseeing the case sentenced both men to life in prison under U.S. Supreme Court precedent that allows judges to consider conduct for which a defendant has been acquitted to impose a longer sentence. And in making the call to put both men behind bars for life, the judge pointed to their guilty pleas in state court.

While the case is now more than two decades old, former Innocence Project lawyer Jarrett Adams is giving it a new life.

Adams took on the case in 2018 and has since uncovered evidence pointing to a different suspect for the murder, evidence that he says was not available to Richardson and Claiborne when they were first charged. He helped Richardson petition the Virginia Court of Appeals in 2019 to consider whether the new material could help prove his innocence.

Richardson nearly tasted freedom in 2021, when then-Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring formally supported the petition after his office spent more than a year investigating the case. But after Herring lost a reelection bid, his successor reversed course and sunk those hopes.

Although the appeals court initially denied the petition, the state's Supreme Court sent the case back to a trial judge, where a contentious discovery battle resulted in some of the new evidence being admitted to the record. Now, more than a quarter-century after the crime first upended Richardson's life, his petition is back before the appeals court.

Adams now runs his own firm and co-founded the nonprofit Life After Justice, an organization which not only takes on wrongful conviction cases but conducts national research on wrongful convictions and offers mental health support to those who have been wrongfully convicted.

He said the convoluted cases all hinge on a guilty plea made under false pretenses that has kept the two men nailed to the wall of the justice system for a crime a federal jury agreed that they didn't commit. He hopes reversing Richardson's plea will be the key to finally sending both of them home.

"The court is just leaning on the guilty plea instead of trying to find out what happened that day," Adams said. "And the reason, I believe, is they are not looking to find out what happened, because they already know. And what they know is that it ain't Terence and Ferrone."

The Guilty Plea

In April 1998, Gibson, then 25 years old and new to the police force in Waverly, Virginia, was found in the woods behind an apartment complex with a bullet wound in his abdomen. Court records say Gibson was able to describe his attackers to responding officers. A "tall and skinny" Black man with "dreadlocks" had shot him with his own gun while the two were wrestling for the weapon, and he was assisted by another Black man who was balding and short, Gibson reported. The officer later died from his injuries.

Police rounded up anyone who loosely fit the descriptions, and eventually they settled on Richardson, 27, and Claiborne, 22, as the prime suspects. Both men were arrested and charged with capital murder the day after the killing. They initially pled not guilty.

The pair didn't exactly fit Gibson's description. While police identified Richardson as the "tall and skinny" shooter Gibson had described, Adams said he stood at only five feet, eight inches — several inches shorter than Gibson himself. And Richardson wore his hair in cornrows, not dreadlocks. Claiborne, meanwhile, while fitting Gibson's description as bald, stood four inches taller than Richardson, according to Adams.

They also didn't match any of the DNA evidence on Gibson's person. The only evidence officers had on the two men was witness testimony.

Initially, the investigation hinged on a resident at the apartment complex, Evette Newby, who told officers that she saw Richardson and Claiborne in a struggle with Gibson and later heard gunfire. But over the course of several interviews by the local sheriff's department and federal agents in the weeks following the killing, court records show that her statements changed several times and were sometimes improbable.

For instance, Newby first named a different man — one who could not have been present because he was incarcerated at the time — as the person she'd seen. Newby also later testified in federal court that one of the sheriff's officers had pressured her to say she saw Richardson shoot Gibson, which she said on the stand that she did not.

Nearly a year after the killing, prosecutors reduced the charges against the two defendants from capital murder to involuntary manslaughter in exchange for their guilty pleas. According to the report that attorney general Herring prepared years later in response to Richardson's innocence petition, a state prosecutor had admitted to the press that the case was weak and that "the risks in going to trial with a jury were just astronomical."

The Virginia State Police, who were brought in to help with the investigation, also expressed skepticism about Richardson and Claiborne's arrests, stating in a 2001 report "that there was insufficient probable cause to arrest the suspects."

What prosecutors did have, however, was testimony from Richardson's friend and his alibi, Shawn Wooden. While Richardson told police that he had been asleep on Wooden's couch when the shooting took place, Wooden testified at a plea hearing that he went to Waverly Apartments on the morning of the murder with Claiborne and Richardson. He said that Claiborne told him they were going to meet a guy behind the apartment complex, according to Herring's report.

According to court documents, Wooden would go on to change his story several times. When first questioned by police, he corroborated Richardson's story that the two had been sleeping and didn't find out about the shooting until later. When police pressed Wooden though, he said he had acted as a lookout for Richardson and Claiborne and alerted them when he saw Gibson patrolling the back of the apartment building. Wooden said he fled when he saw Gibson go into the woods but heard a gunshot as he left the area. Then some time after the shooting, Wooden told police that Richardson confessed to killing Gibson.

With no alibi and a friend testifying against them, Richardson and Claiborne told Adams' organization, Life After Justice, in a 2021 interview that they felt trapped into taking the plea deal.

"My family ran out of money," Claiborne said. "They were talking about giving us the death penalty. When our attorney came to us and said that this was the best deal, what else was I supposed to do in order to stay alive?"

Richardson said his lawyer told him that, "even though they know that it may not have been y'all that did it, they're going to make somebody wear this case. And it's going to be y'all. You're going to get the death penalty."

"I said, 'Man that's crazy. You're trying to tell me I got to go to prison for something I didn't do?" Richardson said.

The Federal Case

Richardson and Claiborne took the plea deal in December 1999, with Richardson admitting to involuntary manslaughter and Claiborne agreeing he had served as an accessory after the fact.

Richardson was sentenced to 10 years with five suspended based on good behavior, while Claiborne was sentenced to time served.

Adams said there was public outrage at the outcome.

"If you're in D.C. and you're reading that, out of Waverly, Virginia, a cop was killed by two Black guys and they plead guilty, but [one is] given time served, you're going to be like, 'What the hell man?'" Adams said. "You've never seen such concessions made for Black men accused of killing a white guy. It just doesn't happen."

So in December 2000, amid pressure from Gibson's family and others, federal prosecutors indicted Richardson and Claiborne under the RICO Act for one count of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, one count of use of a firearm to commit murder during drug trafficking, and one count of murder of a law enforcement officer during drug trafficking.

"These drug charges came out of nowhere. It was a loophole," Adams said. "They couldn't just say, 'We're trying to get to the murder of this officer.' There would have been some sovereignty issues with that. But this way they could do it and say, 'I'm charging you with a RICO case where your drug dealing resulted in the death of an officer.'"

As with the state case, the federal case included no physical evidence in support of the charges. But Wooden testified at the trial, changing his story again to one even more incriminating for Richardson and Claiborne. He said Claiborne had a "quarter of an ounce of crack cocaine" on him when the three of them walked to Waverly Apartments. Wooden said he was starting to smoke the crack Claiborne gave him when Gibson approached and grabbed Richardson. Wooden said he saw Richardson get ahold of Gibson's gun, but that he didn't see the shot being fired. He said he only heard it, and saw Richardson with Gibson's gun afterward.

Wooden claimed in the federal trial that he had lied about being "the lookout" at the preliminary hearing.

The federal prosecutors also presented expanded testimony from Newby and additional witnesses who claimed they overheard Richardson admitting to the murder.

Despite this, in September 2001, the jury acquitted both men on the murder and gun-related charges, but found them guilty of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine.

The fact that the jury not only found the pair innocent of murder but also of wielding a gun speaks volumes, Adams said.

"They didn't find them not guilty of the murder because they thought it was an accident," he said. "They can't even prove they were holding the gun."

One juror in the case said in an interview with a Richmond-based ABC affiliate in 2017 that, during deliberations, "no one ever really thought they were guilty of murder."

But when it came time to sentence the two men, U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne, instead of doling out the average 10 years for the drug charge, decided to sentence both to life in prison without probation.

He cited a U.S. Supreme Court case — United States v. Watts — in which the justices ruled that judges could consider conduct alleged in charges that defendants were acquitted of when making sentencing decisions. Judge Payne found that Richardson and Claiborne's prior guilty pleas were enough evidence that "both defendants participated in the killing of Officer Gibson," even if a jury had found them innocent of this on a federal level.


"When that judge sentenced Ron to life in prison, I said I wish I could just grab his hand and jump out this window and both of us die," Claiborne's father, Curtis Claiborne, told Life After Justice in a 2021 interview. "They took his life for nothing."

New Evidence

Richardson and Claiborne appealed the federal judge's sentence to no avail. The Fourth Circuit affirmed the decision in 2002.

Neither had challenged the underlying state case until Adams came across their file in 2018.

Adams is no stranger to the failures of the justice system. At 17, he was sentenced to 28 years in a maximum-security prison after being wrongfully convicted of the rape of a college student in Wisconsin. He served nearly 10 of those years until the Seventh Circuit exonerated him and he walked free in January 2007. He said he's used the experience of fighting his own wrongful conviction to fuel his work for others.


Between his work for the Innocence Project, at the firm he founded in 2017 and as co-founder of Life After Justice, Adams said that a lot of innocence cases cross his desk — many that don't ultimately amount to much. But when Claiborne's aunt Mary approached him at a speaking event in Virginia in 2018 and handed him an envelope with information about her nephew's case, he said he could see "the creases and wrinkles of anguish on her forehead." As Adams looked further into it, he said he began to feel confident that Richardson and Claiborne were innocent.

Adams hired investigators to dig deeper into the evidence in the state case, and eventually found documents showing there had been another witness whom police had interviewed but did not call in the plea hearing: a 9-year-old girl named Shannequia Gay. Gay had been staying in the apartment complex with her aunt and was playing outside when the shooting occurred.

Gay said in her statement that she saw a man with "dreads" run into the woods with Gibson, heard a loud noise, and then saw Gibson with blood on his stomach. "The man with dreads," is whom she said she spotted running away. Based on this description, investigators showed Gay a picture of Leonard Newby, an early suspect in the case and the brother of key prosecution witness Evette Newby. According to a law enforcement memo describing the interview, which Adams provided in Richardson's innocence petition, Gay did not identify Newby as the shooter at the time, but "she became afraid when she saw the picture."

Adams also found a copy of a photo array including a picture of Richardson, who had cornrows at the time, and a generic photograph of a man with dreads that looked more like Leonard Newby's. Gay's initials were written next to the second photograph, although Adams said there was nothing in the documents to clarify what the mark-up meant.

In addition to evidence of the police's interviews with Gay, Adams also discovered there had been an anonymous 911 tip that identified Leonard Newby as a suspect.

None of the information about Gay or about the 911 tip had been turned over to Richardson's defense counsel as he faced charges from the state. And in the innocence petition Adams went on to file on Richardson's behalf in the Virginia Court of Appeals, he argued that it had violated his client's rights under the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to turn over any evidence that could exonerate a criminal defendant.

"Terence and Ron had no idea there was a statement pointing to someone else who did it, they had no idea there was a photo lineup and that a 911 tip came in identifying Leonard Newby when his sister was supposed to be the main witness," Adams told Law360. "How does a cop get killed and there's an identification photo lineup that never comes up?"

Actual Innocence

In April 2021, Adams helped both Richardson and Claiborne file an innocence petition in state court. However, Claiborne's submission was immediately rejected. Ironically, although he is also serving a life sentence, he was only convicted of a misdemeanor in state court, for which Virginia law does not allow such petitions.

But in the case of Richardson's petition, then-Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring's office decided to throw its support behind it.

Herring said in a filing that he didn't find the new evidence to be a smoking gun. For example, he said he wasn't entirely convinced by Gay's statement, given that she provided different descriptions of the man in the woods in several other interviews, at one point saying he wore cornrows instead of dreads. He concluded that the new pieces of evidence would need to be further examined in a discovery hearing to show both that there was no way Richardson's attorney at the time could have gotten his hands on them, and that they were material to proving Richardson's innocence.

But the potentially shaky new evidence aside, Herring found that the federal jury's acquittal of Richardson was compelling new evidence in and of itself.

"This case is unique in that it is also clear that no rational factfinder would have found Mr. Richardson guilty had that information been presented in his proceedings in state court," Herring wrote in a November 2021 court filing. "The federal jury acquittal is conclusive in that regard."

In support of their own murder-related charges under the RICO Act, federal prosecutors not only presented the evidence their state counterparts had offered up at Richardson and Claiborne's plea hearing, but even more evidence on top of that, Herring's office pointed out. And still, a jury did not find the evidence convincing. Had either man known this, they likely would not have pled guilty, Herring's office said.

"The fact that Mr. Richardson was acquitted by a jury of being involved in the homicide in federal court of the same homicide for which he pled guilty is strong evidence that the case against Mr. Richardson was weak," Herring's office said.

But before the court could consider Herring's recommendation, he lost his reelection bid to Republican rival Jason Miyares. And when Miyares took office in early 2022, he reversed course, arguing that Richardson had admitted guilt in state court and that the federal trial was not pertinent to his actual innocence.

"A guilty plea is not an exercise of convenience or a mere bargaining chip," Miyares' office said in its own filing in response to Richardson's petition. "It requires significant, incriminating admissions from a person that are not made lightly. In the actual innocence context, a properly supported guilty plea … gives rise to a strong legal presumption that [Richardson] remains guilty of the crime for which he voluntarily admitted guilt."

Miyares argued that it was ultimately Richardson's responsibility to offer up the federal verdict as newly found evidence, but that he had failed to do so.

And even if Richardson had presented the federal trial verdict in his petition, Miyares argued that the federal charges had a different burden of proof than an involuntary manslaughter charge at the state level.

The attorney general's office told Law360 that they would not comment on ongoing litigation.

Adams said he found the attorney general's position wildly frustrating.

"They don't want to talk about the facts of the case," Adams said. "They want to talk about procedure."

But the Virginia Court of Appeals agreed with Miyares, dismissing Richardson's petition upon the attorney general's recommendation in June 2022.

The Virginia Supreme Court, however, ultimately found that the new evidence warranted a closer look. So in May, the Sussex County Circuit Court held a hearing in which Richardson was able to call multiple witnesses, including Shannequia Gay, the police officers who interviewed her, and others.

Gay, notably, testified that she hardly remembered anything about the investigation, making it impossible for Richardson to say for a fact whether she had clearly identified Leonard Newby as a suspect.

In a May opinion, the trial court ultimately found that, in many instances, Richardson couldn't satisfy his burden of proof to show either that he and his original attorney couldn't have found the newly offered information prior to his guilty plea, or that the information was material to his innocence. So while the court ruled that Richardson could admit the new evidence for the Virginia Court of Appeals to consider, it placed limitations on how the material could be presented.

And so, armed with at least some of the new evidence, Adams filed a new brief to the Virginia Court of Appeals last month explaining why the court should grant Richardson's innocence petition.

If Richardson does prevail in reversing his guilty plea, Adams hopes it will be grounds for both he and Claiborne to ask the federal court to take another look at their life sentence. Whatever happens, Adams anticipates there's a long road ahead for both of his clients, but he said he won't stop fighting.

"The only time these guys were ever given a fair shot in court, they were acquitted," he said.

"I don't know if I'm going to be here to see the end of it, but the entire world needs to see what they're doing to these men. I don't know if we'll ever win in a court of law, but I'm going to make sure we're made known in the court of public opinion."

--Editing by Nicole Bleier.

Have a story idea for Access to Justice? Reach us at accesstojustice@law360.com.