
At his home where he lives with his son’s family, Ricky Dority spends the majority of his time playing with his grandchildren, tending to poultry, and working in the yard.
It’s a startling shift from only a few months ago when he was imprisoned for life in Oklahoma’s Joseph Harp Correctional Center for a murder he said he didn’t commit. Dority had no hope of getting released after spending more than 20 years in prison until he used his pandemic relief monies to hire a persistent private investigator.
As a result of discrepancies discovered in the state’s account of a 1997 cold-case homicide by the investigator and students at Oklahoma City University’s Oklahoma Innocence Project, which is committed to clearing innocent people of wrongfully held convictions in the state, Dority’s conviction was overturned in June by a Sequoyah County judge.
The 65-year-old claims to be content with the 5-acre property now. It is located in a peaceful community of affluent homes in the gently sloping hills of the Arkansas River Valley outside of Fort Smith. “If you’ve been gone for a long time, you no longer take it for granted.”
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, Dority is one of approximately 3,400 individuals who have been cleared of all charges nationwide since 1989, the majority of them involving murder convictions. Without counting the three exonerations that have occurred this year, there have been more than 43 exonerations in Oklahoma throughout that time.
The instances highlight a serious issue with the legal system, where many older convictions came about as a result of overburdened defense lawyers, poor forensic work, overzealous prosecutors, and antiquated investigative methods.
Given Oklahoma’s history of sending people to death row, where 11 prisoners have been cleared since 1981, the issue is particularly significant. A Republican-led legislative body is now debating whether to impose a moratorium on the death penalty as a result of the problem.
Glynn Ray Simmons was released from prison in Oklahoma County after serving nearly 50 years in prison, including time spent on death row, for a killing that occurred in 1974 after a judge ruled that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence, including a police report that suggested an eyewitness might have identified additional suspects.
A rape and burglary conviction against Perry Lott, who spent more than 30 years in jail, was recently overturned in Pontotoc County as a result of fresh DNA evidence that excluded him as the offender. Pontotoc County, in particular, has come under severe criticism for a number of erroneous convictions in the 1980s that were the subject of multiple novels, including John Grisham’s “The Innocent Man,” which he turned into a six-part Netflix documentary.
According to the Innocence Project, a nationwide group located in New York, the most frequent causes of erroneous convictions are eyewitness misidentification, incorrect application of forensic science, false confessions, coerced pleas, and official wrongdoing, typically by police or prosecutors.
In the case of Mitchell Nixon, who was discovered battered to death in 1997, Dority claimed that an overzealous sheriff and a state prosecutor railroaded him into a guilty plea.
According to Andrea Miller, the legal director of the Oklahoma Innocence Project, investigators who revived the case in 2014 forced Rex Robbins to confess. In Nixon’s death, Robbins, who would later enter a guilty plea for manslaughter, implicated Dority, who was then serving time in a federal prison on a gun charge. According to Dority, he discovered documents proving he had been detained on the day of the murder and realized he had nothing to do with it.
Because I was aware that I had nothing to do with the murder, I believed I was in the clear, said Dority. “But they tried me for it, and they found me guilty of it.”
A police informant testified before the jury regarding Robbins’ confession and claimed that Dority had changed bloody clothes at his home the night of the murder. He was found guilty of first-degree murder, and a life sentence without the possibility of parole was suggested.
After serving years in jail, Dority used his federal COVID-19 relief check to hire a private investigator, he claimed, while the majority of inmates used theirs to buy food at the commissary. Bobby Staton had primarily looked into insurance fraud, but when he started on this case, he quickly discovered that it was full of gaps.
He ultimately contacted the university’s Oklahoma Innocence Project, which tasked Abby Brawner, a law student, with conducting the inquiry.
When Staton and Brawner visited Robbins at the high-security Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, he recanted his statement against Dority, and thus put an end to their inquiry.
Brawner remarked, “It was pretty intimidating.” In particular, “especially when you’re going in to meet someone who doesn’t know you’re coming and doesn’t want to talk to you.”
Additionally, Brawner and Staton discovered the informant didn’t reside at the house where he claimed to have met Staton when he arrived in gory attire. The judge dismissed the case this summer after the real homeowner testified.
The judge ruled that Dority’s initial counsel was deficient for failing to establish that the informant did not reside at the residence, giving the prosecution 90 days to decide whether to retry him. Prosecutors have stated they intend to approach the judge for an extension of time for DNA testing after the initial three months were extended. Dority said he is unconcerned about extra forensic testing because he is sure of his innocence.
The Associated Press sent inquiries for comments to Sequoyah County District Attorney Jack Thorp and former Sheriff Ron Lockhart, but neither one responded. However, after hearing the homeowner’s testimony and finding a witness “was not credible,” Assistant District Attorney James Dunn, who is currently in charge of the case but was not present when it was initially prosecuted, said he agreed with the judge’s dismissal.
An innocent person being imprisoned for a crime they did not commit is the last thing Dunn wants to witness. “Because that means the actual criminal, or those criminals, are still at large,” the speaker explains.
According to him, Dority is currently learning how to operate a smartphone and a remote control for a television. He expresses gratitude to Staton and the Innocence Project and claims that his case shows that other Oklahomans are unfairly imprisoned.
“After what they’ve done to me, I know there are innocent people in that prison who need to be released and need help getting out,” he stated. I would have remained there for the rest of my life if they hadn’t managed to free me.