{"text":[[{"start":6.89,"text":"The recorder clicks on. The time is 21.30. The date: November 19 2002. The subject is Jessicah Black. She’s 16 years old, from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She’s come down on her own. Nobody arrested her. And, “As of right now, you understand you’re still . . . free to leave,” the detective states. She replies that she understands."}],[{"start":28.44,"text":"But the truth is, she hasn’t felt free. Not for a moment. She’s felt trapped and threatened for hours, afraid she’ll go to prison if she doesn’t say what these men want her to say."}],[{"start":42.08,"text":"She didn’t come here to tell lies — the total opposite, in fact. At the beginning of the interview, she told the officers what really happened. In her tired, soft Southern drawl, she’d insisted on it. But they just got angry, said she was making things up, that she knew more than she was letting on."}],[{"start":60.64,"text":"Hundreds of questions followed: some spoken, some shouted, some plain spat out. At times, one of the men leaned in so close that flecks of saliva landed on her auburn hair and round face as she sat on the hard chair in the interview room. The harsh lighting made her feel sick."}],[{"start":74.759,"text":"And in the midst of it all, there was the fact of a dead man in South Winston-Salem: Nathaniel Jones, beaten and bound with duct tape at his home. And the growing sense that the police had already decided what her place in that story would be — that she could be charged as an accessory to murder."}],[{"start":91.088,"text":"If she’d just tell the truth, all this could be avoided, the detectives insist. But the truth, that word, it sort of seems meaningless now. Because the truth — that she didn’t know Jones, she’s never heard of him, and she’s convinced the boys, her friends, don’t know anything either — isn’t the version of events that is going to get her out of here. By the time the detective hits record on the tape machine, she feels crazy — unsure of what she’s saying."}],[{"start":114.531,"text":"“OK. We’re gonna start on Friday afternoon, November the 15th, at about four o’clock,” he says."}],[{"start":120.754,"text":"That’s when Jessicah Black starts to tell the story that will not only rewrite the past, but her own future, too."}],[{"start":127.98,"text":"Nathaniel Jones was known around Winston-Salem as “Chilly”. He was a deacon at Dreamland Park Baptist Church, a widower, a grandfather, a man who spent nearly four decades running Jones Chevron, one of the first Black-owned service stations in North Carolina. If you met him and asked how he was, he’d tell you, “I am blessed and highly favoured in the Lord.” Among his grandchildren was Christopher Paul, then a teenage basketball star who had just signed for Wake Forest University and was on track for the NBA."}],[{"start":159.247,"text":"Jones grew up in and around the Black churches and tobacco factories of the old, racially segregated Winston-Salem. By 2002, things were changing, but the city was still deeply divided. Some neighbourhoods had money and opportunity; others had poverty and neglect. Belview, the south side and Moravia Street, where Jones lived, were part of that second world. It was there, on the evening of November 15 2002, amid the beige bungalows, that police found Jones face-down on the floor of his carport, bound with black tape. He had been beaten and his wallet stolen, but money remained in his car and pockets. The groceries he’d bought sat undisturbed on the kitchen counter and in the trunk of his car. His valuables were left untouched. An autopsy showed Jones died of cardiac arrhythmia brought on by the stress of the attack."}],[{"start":211.371,"text":"In the days after Jones’s killing, the Winston-Salem police had a host of leads. A Hispanic male was seen jumping fences near Jones’s house at the time of the crime. There was a disgruntled former employee. Then there were the repeated calls from the same number to a local taxi company requesting a cab be sent out to Jones’s address around the time of the murder — the dispatcher suspected the caller was a “young Black male”. Another neighbour reported seeing a small-framed Black man in Jones’s car and noticing a door at a nearby house on Moravia Street closing around the time of the incident."}],[{"start":245.648,"text":"Local newspapers followed the story closely and public pressure was mounting. In the days after Jones’s death, his grandson scored exactly 61 points during a high-school game, one for each year of Jones’s life. “I guess I was just trying to send a message to my grandfather, to let him know how much we missed him,” Paul later told The Washington Post."}],[{"start":265.983,"text":"I first heard about the Winston-Salem Five in the summer of 2025. Over the months that followed, I began reading through thousands of pages of court records and police interviews made available to me by defence lawyers, and interviewing many of the people involved in the case. The scenes represented in this story are reconstructed from that material."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":285.6,"text":"One of the first things I noticed was that, according to police files, there was little or no meaningful follow-up on any of the early leads. Officers seemed at a loss. But then another detective working on the case received a chance phone call. The woman on the other end of the line was Arlene Tolliver. She purportedly told him that her 14-year-old son, Jermal, had been acting strangely since the homicide."}],[{"start":308.872,"text":"The police brought Jermal Tolliver in and from there things moved fast. The boy named the friends he had been with that evening — Nathaniel Cauthen, Rayshawn Banner, Christopher Bryant, Dorrell Brayboy. By 4.30pm that same day, officers had identified another member of their circle: a white girl named Jessicah Black."}],[{"start":327.98,"text":"That’s why she’s here now, exhausted, explaining to the officers about how she liked to drive around the south side in her black 1986 Mercury Cougar — a gift from her grandparents. That autumn, she’d often drive along Devonshire near Belview Park on a whim, hoping to see the boys, sometimes circling back if they weren’t there."}],[{"start":347.156,"text":"And on that day in November, or so she tells the detectives, that was just how it happened. She drove up Devonshire Street, and there they all were: Bryant, Cauthen, Banner, Tolliver and Brayboy. She picked them up and, at first, she tells the officers, they were “just driving around”. But then the mood in the car changed. A conversation started in the back seat, she says. Bryant was “joking around and he was like — ‘You know — don’t you think it’d be kind of funny — you know — if we went out here and we jacked somebody and just took their money . . . ’”"}],[{"start":376.24,"text":"She says they stopped at a Dollar General, then at the Maxway store, where the boys bought duct tape. After that, they drove to Belview Park. That’s where the boys spotted Jones’s car. They got out and headed down Moravia Street towards his house, leaving her behind. A few minutes later, she heard the shouting. Then a commotion. Ten minutes after that, the boys came back. “Yeah, we got that shit,” she heard them say. “We fucked him up.” At least that’s what she tells the detectives — that at first she did not fully understand what was happening, but that once she heard the yelling and the banging, “I knew what they had done.”"}],[{"start":410.8,"text":"At exactly 10pm, Jessicah Black finishes her confession, 30 minutes after it began. That’s it, she thinks, it’s over. In fact, it’s just the beginning. Elsewhere in the building, the police have been pressing the boys to tell the same story."}],[{"start":434.8,"text":"Bryant, Cauthen, Banner, Tolliver and Brayboy are neighbourhood boys. Their lives circle a few blocks: Goldfloss, Moravia, Belview Park are the names they know best. Nathaniel Cauthen and Rayshawn Banner are brothers who live on Goldfloss. Teresa Banner, their mother, will later tell me they were from a structured, close-knit family: “They were good people, they had a heart.” The boys weren’t rich, but nor were they from poverty: “They always had food. They always had clothes. We always had money.” They are boys who gather on porches and in yards, who ride around on bikes and mopeds, play ball, skip school and go to the bowling alley, get high and spend long evenings with nowhere in particular to be. That, the boys insist, was all they were doing when Jones was killed. Brayboy says they were just riding around. Cauthen flatly denies any involvement and even asks for a lie-detector test."}],[{"start":480.799,"text":"The investigators do not accept these firm denials. To them, they seem likely to be the initial stories of a group of boys who know more than they are saying. As officers move in and out of interview rooms, carrying information from one interrogation to the next, the pressure intensifies. They tell the teenagers that their friends are already telling their side of it, that they should too. Under North Carolina law in 2002, police are permitted to exaggerate, even to suggest they have evidence they do not possess. There is no rule requiring a parent or other adult to be present while 14- and 15-year-olds are questioned. For most of their time in these rooms, the five boys are alone."}],[{"start":518.48,"text":"When I interviewed him in late 2025, Tolliver told me that a detective asked him to hold out his arm. “That’s the vein,” he told him. “This is where the lethal injection would go.” Bryant said that when an officer said the same to him, he began to cry and thought he should tell them whatever they wanted to hear. Banner told me that officers played him the recording of his brother’s confession. The Winston-Salem Police Department did not reply to requests for comments for this article, but several of the detectives confirmed these details in depositions years later. The office of the district attorney said it could not comment on pending litigation."}],[{"start":552.96,"text":"Slowly, the boys begin to change their stories. The confessions recorded by the police that night vary drastically in the details, and often do not fit the evidence, but the broad outline goes something like this: as Jones arrives home, the boys approach. One or two act as lookouts while others go to the side door or carport. Jones opens the door or is intercepted outside. He is struck, beaten, taped up and robbed. In some statements, a baseball bat is used; in others, fists and kicking are featured prominently. The lights in the carport are said to have been disabled by unscrewing the bulbs. After the attack, the boys run back to Black’s car, dump the tape in the park, go home to change clothes, and then head to the bowling alley. Later, they return to Moravia Street to view the scene once police and emergency crews arrive."}],[{"start":603.52,"text":"Almost as soon as Jessicah Black leaves the police station, she feels something is off. She’s just not sure what exactly. She’s never been in trouble with the police before and her life has been relatively sheltered until now. She grew up between the south side of Winston-Salem and more suburban stretches like Gumtree and Ivy Oakley. At home, the expectations are clear: she’s the first grandchild, the one supposed to set the example. She’s pushed to get good grades, graduate, stay out of trouble. To do something with her life."}],[{"start":617.42,"text":"Socially, though, she may have drifted a little outside those parameters. She likes to hang out in the south side of Winston-Salem. Not because she is reckless, but because she doesn’t care about class or race divisions. She never really fitted in with the other girls. She just wanted to drive, smoke a little weed and live her life with whomever she wanted. It was her teenage rebellion."}],[{"start":655.36,"text":"The day after she gets back from the police station, she talks to her mother. “Momma,” she says, “I didn’t see nothing.” She says the police pulled her in, and she doesn’t understand why. She was with the boys at the park, but she’s sure they didn’t do it — they aren’t the type. Now she’s worried it’s too late. What has she said? What has she done?"}],[{"start":672.095,"text":"Back at the police station, her friends are asking themselves similar questions. They’ve confessed to a crime they did not commit."}],[{"start":680.17,"text":"All five boys are charged with first-degree murder and assault with a dangerous weapon, and almost immediately, all five of them recant and move to suppress their statements. But how do you undo admitting to murder?"}],[{"start":691.314,"text":"At the suppression hearings in early 2004, the boys tell a different story. They describe not a planned robbery but an ordinary Friday evening: after school, they gathered at Bryant’s house. There was some talk of going to the mall, but when it started to rain the plan fell through. Later, Black picked them up in her car, and they drove around, eventually dropping off a friend on Moravia Street. When Tolliver noticed police lights, he got out and asked a girl he knew from school what had happened. She told him an old man had been murdered. That was it."}],[{"start":723.68,"text":"The judge is unmoved: “Now, my problem with that would be why would anyone make a false statement implicating themselves after being told that the punishment of what they are accused of doing is death?” he says."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":734.367,"text":"The confessions remain as evidence, and the state splits the case into two parts: the brothers Cauthen and Banner will be tried first; Bryant, Tolliver and Brayboy second. Why, exactly, it is difficult to say in hindsight. Christine Mumma, the attorney who has represented Banner since 2020 and Cauthen since 2022, can only speculate: perhaps prosecutors hoped convictions in the first trial would flush out pleas in the second? Perhaps they wanted to see the state’s case tested once before running it again; perhaps five boys, five lawyers and five confessions were simply too unwieldy to handle at once."}],[{"start":772.7,"text":"Jessicah Black appears at both trials — the first in August 2004 and the second in May 2005. At both, she tells the same story she’s told the police — the one in which the boys are guilty."}],[{"start":784.939,"text":"On the stand, she builds the story up piece by piece. First, the car. Then the streets. Then the talk of jacking someone. Then the tape, the park, the shouts and screams in the late evening on Moravia Street: “Get the fuck down”, “Give us that shit”. When the boys come back, they are grinning, breathless, triumphant."}],[{"start":803.76,"text":"In the courtroom, the prosecutor keeps walking her forward. She knows, even as she speaks, that the words do not sit right inside her. But by then, the story has been repeated so many times that it has hardened into something vaguely resembling the truth. And she is still terrified that she could be implicated in the murder. The prosecutors are kind. They reassure her. They even let her smoke inside their office. Before the trials, they offer her a thick transcript they’ve prepared so there aren’t any slip-ups. They tell her where to begin, what matters, how not to get lost. So she stays inside the lines, answers their questions. She will get through it."}],[{"start":842.63,"text":"By the second trial in May 2005, she is heavily pregnant on the stand, and sometimes she can’t breathe. She has to ask for a recess to pull herself together. She cannot look at the boys, though she feels them looking at her. Tolliver notices the strain before he understands it. “One time she looked like she was gonna cry,” he tells me later. Bryant sits listening, stunned. “I was like, why is she lying? I can’t believe it . . . I was mad.”"}],[{"start":869.926,"text":"And somewhere behind sits Jones’s family, still trying to understand what had happened to the man who had held them together, who they described as their “rock”."}],[{"start":878.968,"text":"In both trials, the evidence is full of absences. Numerous items — clothing, shoes, the seat cover and cuttings from the car — are tested for blood, but none is found. Police have not recovered the wallet that one confession said had been discarded. Nor can they link the duct tape used in the attack to the defendants: investigators have found no matching roll at Dollar General or Maxway, and Dollar General surveillance footage shows no one resembling the defendants entering the store. Even the alleged robbery appears incomplete: more than $900 remained in Jones’s pocket, and more than $1,400 was still in a briefcase in the trunk of his car."}],[{"start":919.84,"text":"The confessions raise equally serious concerns. Firstly, they don’t match up. One says there was no plan; another says Bryant directed the robbery. They disagree over how they approached Jones, who carried weapons, who tied him up, whether the carport light was disabled and where he was left. Secondly, the court does not meaningfully confront the possibility that the boys — all of whom had learning difficulties — have been pressured into making false confessions. School reports, predating the interrogations, show that they struggled with “communication, self-direction, work habits, [and] social skills”, impairments that would have made it harder for them to process detectives’ questions, and especially vulnerable to suggestion and authority."}],[{"start":960.48,"text":"None of it seems to matter. The boys’ confessions, Black’s testimony and a Nike trainer print found on the bonnet of Jones’s car — said to match shoes owned by Cauthen — bolster the prosecution’s narrative. During the closing statements, Banner’s then lawyer, Robert Leonard, appears to concede that Banner may have been present and minimally involved, while arguing he did not participate and was not part of any plan. “He — he may have been there, but he wasn’t part of what was taking place,” he tells the court. Under North Carolina’s felony-murder and acting-in-concert rules in 2004, this is a dangerous concession: if the jurors believe Banner helped with the robbery, even without intending a killing, the law can still make him liable for murder."}],[{"start":1001.966,"text":"And it does. Cauthen and his younger brother Banner are convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The next year, Bryant, Tolliver and Brayboy are convicted of second-degree murder and are each sentenced to a maximum of 198 months (16 and a half years) in prison."}],[{"start":1020.288,"text":"After the verdict, what Jessicah Black feels is not simple. There is relief in it, certainly, but shame too. She knows she has lied. But by this point, the lie has been repeated so often that her own truth no longer feels steady. She didn’t let her family come to court. She was worried they’d be ashamed. The whole thing has made her question her perception of herself. But she can’t let herself get into that. She wants to get on with her life and have her baby. Never be in trouble again."}],[{"start":1051.227,"text":"So she seals it off. For years, she makes sure her name stays clear of the case, carrying the fear that they could still come back and charge her. When she becomes a mother, she feels she has to protect her son from everything, including her past. She struggles with her mental health but cannot bring herself to tell the therapist about the murder or the trials. She is terrified to go back to the south side."}],[{"start":1074.64,"text":"She keeps going, working where she can — landscaping, factory jobs, beauty, carpentry — whatever is there — while raising her son and holding the secret. But in her twenties, her body begins to fail: double hip replacements, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, spinal damage, a blood clot. Work becomes harder, money tighter."}],[{"start":1096.8,"text":"Then her son reaches the age her friends were when they were detained. The case is no longer only a memory. She looks at her boy and, for the first time, in a way that feels almost unbearable, she understands what was done to them."}],[{"start":1109.193,"text":"Bryant, Cauthen, Banner, Tolliver and Brayboy do not give up on their claims of innocence. In the years following their convictions, they appeal and lose. The North Carolina courts uphold the convictions in 2006 and 2007. The boys, approaching their twenties, file Motions for Appropriate Relief, trying to reopen the case through the ordinary channels of post-conviction review. Those are denied, too."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":1133.752,"text":"By now, the state’s story has hardened into doctrine: the confessions were voluntary, the verdicts sound, the case closed. What remains for the boys is the long afterlife of conviction — years measured by birthdays, funerals and missed childhoods. By paperwork, waiting and the repeated humiliation of being told that what they said had happened to them does not count."}],[{"start":1155.719,"text":"Nathaniel Cauthen reaches a point where he can no longer bear it. He feels trapped, “isolated”. In prison, there’s so much violence. He learns not to lash out, but restraint comes at a cost. In the summer of 2014, he writes a letter to his brother, Rayshawn Banner. He begins: “What’s good little brother, by the time you read this, I should be dead. I can’t stand this anymore . . . ” On July 3, prison officers find him in time to save his life."}],[{"start":1186.14,"text":"“We weren’t supposed to grow up there,” Bryant tells me later. He could endure missing the world outside, he says, but not the thought that someone he loved might die while he was locked away. “That was my worst thought, that I’d lose my mama while I was inside.”"}],[{"start":1207.23,"text":"So Bryant keeps writing — to lawyers, innocence organisations, anyone who might listen. One of the places he writes to is the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, a state-created body that investigates credible claims of innocence. If the commission takes a case, it re-examines the record, interviews witnesses, tests evidence and, if warranted, sends the claim on to an eight-member panel to decide whether it merits judicial review. If it does, the Chief Justice appoints a three-judge panel to hear the evidence."}],[{"start":1230.384,"text":"In March 2015, the commission moves Bryant’s claim into a formal inquiry. The other men follow with their own claims."}],[{"start":1238.59,"text":"By the beginning of 2018, Jessicah Black does not know any of this. She doesn’t know that the boys’ appeals have failed, or that the courts have left the convictions standing. She doesn’t know that Bryant, Brayboy and Tolliver have served their time and come home, while Banner and Cauthen remain in prison. She doesn’t know anything about the Jones family, either — about the daughters he left behind, or the grandson Chris Paul, who will soon write a book about his grandfather in which he’ll say he is sure the boys are guilty, but is conflicted about their long prison sentences. By now, the public weight of the case has changed. Back in the early 2000s, Nathaniel Jones was a respected member of the community, a local role model. Now he is also the grandfather of an NBA superstar."}],[{"start":1284.14,"text":"Then, in the summer of 2019, Black sees a story on the local news. Dorrell Brayboy has been murdered in a car park, in a dispute over money. The news shatters her. It feels so unfair: to be killed so soon after getting out of jail for a crime she is pretty sure he did not commit."}],[{"start":1301.02,"text":"Around the same time, a journalist from Texas writes to her on Facebook Messenger. He says his name is Hunter Atkins, he works for the Houston Chronicle and that he’s doing a story on the five boys convicted of killing Nathaniel Jones. At first, she tells him to get lost. She wants nothing to do with it. But Atkins is tenacious. “He really is a nice guy, super nice guy,” she later tells investigators. She finally relents."}],[{"start":1324.8,"text":"At an IHOP on Peters Creek Parkway, the conversation, which Atkins tapes, begins with small talk — about work, her mother, her son, her life up to this point. Sometimes she jokes, sometimes Atkins laughs, and sometimes the meet-up feels almost normal, just two people in a booth of a popular chain restaurant, their coffee going cold. Then, Atkins takes her back to that evening in November 2002: the park, what she could really hear, whether the police had fed her the story she later told in court. He is careful, “I don’t want to lead anything . . . I don’t want to put any adjectives in your [mouth],” he says. And that, more than anything, seems to make a difference. Because once she starts talking about what it was like to be 16 in that interrogation room, the old story begins to loosen its grip. Sitting there in the booth, she begins, at last, to say what really happened."}],[{"start":1380,"text":"Soon, she’ll have the chance to do so again. The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission is also looking into the case of the five boys. And they want to speak to Black."}],[{"start":1390.126,"text":"In March 2020, the case comes before the eight-member panel of the commission. New evidence is presented. DNA testing is carried out on the black duct tape used to bind Jones. All five of the boys are excluded, and so is Jessicah Black. A piece of black string entwined with that tape reveals a major female DNA profile and at least one unknown male profile. Although these unidentified DNA profiles offer new leads, investigators are unable to match them to any known individuals, and there is no public record of any follow-up that produced a new suspect or changed the direction of the case. The defence also presents an updated footwear analysis comparing the soles of the Nike Air Force 1 to the impression on the bonnet of Jones’s car. The expert says the shoes could have made the impression, but, unlike the original testimony, cannot call it an exact match: the shoes were so common at the time, and the impression lacks unique identifying features."}],[{"start":1444.23,"text":"Then there is the testimony of Haley Cleary, a developmental psychologist and an expert in juvenile interrogations and confessions. While she says she cannot prove that the boys’ statements are false, she does believe they bear the hallmarks of having been extracted under extreme pressure. She points to the boys’ ages and vulnerability, their history of academic failure. She also cites that the detectives threatened four of the boys with the death penalty, repeatedly called them liars, and rejected their denials. “This is an extremely troubling case that involved numerous known risk factors for false confessions,” Cleary later tells me by email."}],[{"start":1483.52,"text":"In their depositions with the commission, the detectives defend these tactics as a way of forcing honesty. One says he raised the lethal injection to “elicit a truthful response”. None of the boys, however, was legally eligible for the death penalty. Another detective says he told Bryant about the death penalty to impress on him “the importance of being truthful”, and that he was mistaken about Bryant’s eligibility. He calls it “poor judgment”. Detective Chuck Byrom, whom I later speak with on the phone, denies using any such coercive tactics. In his view, they were unnecessary because there was enough evidence to convict the boys even without a confession."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":1521.482,"text":"Black testifies too. She tells the panel that the story she gave in 2002 is not true — that she was young, frightened and alone in what felt like a room full of men for what felt like forever. She’d cried the whole time. The true story of that night, she tells the panel, is that she’d picked up some of the boys after school, driven around with them smoking weed, and then they headed to the bowling alley and mall. Later, they passed the crime scene and one or two of the boys got out to ask what was happening. But nobody could see the house or a body; nobody confessed or planned anything, and she did not even learn a man had been killed until police came for her car days later. She had no evidence to make her believe the boys had participated in the crime."}],[{"start":1564.368,"text":"The hearing lasts five days, and at the end, the commission votes 5–3 that there is sufficient evidence of factual innocence to merit a judicial review. For Black, the relief is immediate. And then, for the first time in all those years, she gets to speak to the boys. Back in the first trials, they had stared at her in disbelief as she told her story from the witness stand. But now the looks are different. Tolliver even hugs her. “No, it’s OK. I ain’t mad at you. You’re good,” he says. Tolliver and Bryant understand that the same thing that happened to them happened to her, too. “We lied on ourselves too, so, I mean, all of us was put in a bad predicament,” Bryant later tells me."}],[{"start":1607.916,"text":"The old case still has defenders, none more steadfast than Jones’s family. His daughters tell the court they had been there “from the first day that everything started to today”, that they had missed no trial, nor any motions they were able to attend, and that they still believed, “We have the right people.” The Jones family did not reply to requests for comments for this story made through the Chris Paul Family Foundation."}],[{"start":1632.29,"text":"In June 2022, two years after the commission’s hearing, a three-judge panel agrees with the family and the state. They do not overturn the conviction. The defence has not proved, with clear and convincing evidence, that the four men are innocent."}],[{"start":1646.339,"text":"In November 2025, I visited Jessicah Black, now in her late thirties, in a trailer park in South Winston-Salem. She was propped on the sofa, an ashtray balanced on her chest, her legs wrapped in blankets and compression socks, her face swollen from the medication stacked in prescription bottles on the shelf behind her head."}],[{"start":1665.68,"text":"“I thought I’d have to go back into hospital today,” she told me. Her voice was hoarse with tobacco, and she seemed exhausted by everything, not least having to go through her story all over again."}],[{"start":1676.88,"text":"Three months earlier, she had testified at yet another hearing. In 2022, the case shifted back into the regular post-conviction system. The next year, the defendants filed Motions for Appropriate Relief, using Black’s recantation, fresh DNA results and the science on false confessions to reopen the case. By the time Black took the stand again, she badly needed the whole thing to be over."}],[{"start":1699.051,"text":"Still, as she sat through her fifth trial-like proceeding, she felt this judge was different from the others. He listened. Whispering to the men who were once the boys in court, she remembered saying, “I swear . . . I think this judge is going to do it, man.” She was right: on August 8 2025 the judge vacated the convictions and ordered the remaining two still serving time be released immediately. They had spent almost a quarter of a century in prison."}],[{"start":1725.6,"text":"Then, just as Banner and Cauthen were about to be released, prosecutors moved to stop it. They argued that Judge Robert Broadie’s ruling was not an acquittal, that it contained errors requiring appellate review, and that the men should remain in prison in the interest of public safety while higher courts considered the case."}],[{"start":1744.07,"text":"Banner and Cauthen’s lawyers argued that the dismissal did function as an acquittal, that double jeopardy barred any further prosecution, and that state law did not permit a dismissal to be stayed merely because prosecutors wanted to appeal. The North Carolina Court of Appeals agreed, but the Supreme Court didn’t. Banner and Cauthen will have to stay in prison until the Court of Appeals issues its opinion on the state of the case as a whole, either upholding Judge Broadie’s order or finding the proper remedy is a new trial."}],[{"start":1772.681,"text":"Mumma told me that Tolliver and Bryant were willing to be retried if it meant Cauthen and Banner would be released in the meantime. “That’s the kind of confidence they have in their innocence,” she said."}],[{"start":1783.462,"text":"For Black, the stay of release felt grimly familiar — another limbo, another non-ending. For more than two decades this case has been dividing and destroying lives. Whatever happens in the future, Black will be for ever tormented by the past. She stubbed out her cigarette and swigged from a luminous orange soft drink by the sofa. She seemed in pain."}],[{"start":1802.16,"text":"“Even if I can sit here and say, they’ve forgiven me and I’ve forgiven myself, I’m still going to hold that guilt,” she said. Every time she thinks about those hours in the interrogation room, she feels the suffocating irony: the “truth” she had to tell in order to go home that day in 2002 did not set her free. It turned out to be the thing that trapped her."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":1824.08,"text":"Eleana Konstantellos André is a Mexico-based photographer. For this story, FT Weekend Magazine invited Konstantellos André to create fictional scenes that reflect aspects of this article. These photographs do not contain the individuals, objects or locations featured in the story."}],[{"start":1841.954,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":1853.2,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1785564787_1124.mp3"}