Criminal justice advocates rallied and delivered a letter to Gov. Cooper Friday petitioning him to issue a pardon to Dontae Sharpe, who spent 24 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
Sharpe, who’s Black, was convicted of the 1994 murder of a George Radcliffe, a 34-year-old white, Greenville man, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. He was 19 when the jury sent him to prison in 1995. Evidentiary hearings during Sharpe’s appeals later uncovered inconsistencies in the account of a 14-year-old girl who served as a key witness.
“This pardon, I’m not begging for it. I’m not pleading for it,” Sharpe said at the press conference before he and his supporters before their march to deliver the letter.