The move was in response to an emergency request filed Monday by North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson’s office to suspend Forsyth County Superior Court Judge Robert Broadie’s decision Friday to throw out the 2002 convictions of four men in the death of Nathaniel Jones.
Jones was found dead with his hands tied behind his back and his mouth taped shut outside his Winston-Salem home in a suspected robbery.
Broadie made the dismissals “with prejudice,” a designation that essentially blocks any appeals of his ruling.
However, the attorney general’s office is seeking to pause enforcement of Broadie’s ruling so the dismissals can be appealed. The appeals court issued a temporary stay Tuesday while it considers a response from defense lawyers, said Chris Mumma, an attorney for the two men still in prison for the killings.
On Monday, Forsyth Assistant District Attorney Mark Parent filed a notice of appeal but that merely informs the court that prosecutors intend to challenge Broadie’s ruling in the case.
That filing follows criticism of Broadie’s ruling by Forsyth District Attorney Jim O’Neill.
“I have never seen that happen before in a court of law,” O’Neill said in a statement to the Journal. “Most judges welcome scrutiny and appellate review of their decisions, especially when it concerns five convicted murderers whose convictions were recently upheld during a lengthy North Carolina Innocence Commission inquiry hearing.”
A three-judge panel denied the men’s claims of innocence after eight days of testimony in an April 2022 hearing.
Broadie’s ruling Friday came in response to a January hearing at which attorneys representing the men sought to have the charges dropped and prosecutors argued that the convictions should stand.
The judge cited recanted testimony from the prosecution’s key witness, poor legal representation, questionable police tactics and the absence of the suspect’s DNA at the scene.
The dismissals came 21 years after Nathaniel Arnold Cauthen, Rayshawn Denard Banner, Christopher Levon Bryant and Jermal Matthew Tolliver were found guilty in the murder of Nathaniel Jones.
The suspects were all 14 or 15 years old when they and another teen were arrested for the killing of Jones in what police said was an apparent robbery the day after the 17-year-old Paul had committed to play basketball at Wake Forest University.
Banner, 36, and Cauthen, 38, are brothers and are serving life sentences for first-degree murder and robbery with a dangerous weapon in relation to the killing.
Bryant and Tolliver, now 37, and Dorrell Queshane Brayboy were convicted of second-degree murder in a separate trial and released from prison in 2017 and 2018. Brayboy was stabbed to death in 2019.
Christine Mumma, the lawyer for Banner and Cauthen, pushed back on criticism of Broadie’s ruling.
“If the General Assembly didn’t want judges to have the authority to dismiss with prejudice, they wouldn’t have given judges that authority,” Mumma, executive director of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, told the Journal in an email. “They also wouldn’t have passed statutes recognizing if charges are dismissed with prejudice, there’s no right of appeal.”
The state can ask the appeals court for permission to appeal but would be required to do so for all nine claims made by the four men related to their convictions, she added.
In a motion opposing the attorney general’s request Monday, Mumma cited a Journal story over the weekend in which O’Neill, the district attorney, said that “the decision to dismiss the convictions with prejudice was particularly startling because it would block any appeals of the ruling.”