One murder, two convictions and a man’s battle to clear his name

The Washington Post, May 18, 2023: One murder, two convictions and a man’s battle to clear his name

“Lamont McKoy had been in prison for five years when he reached out to the police.

“‘I’m not trying to be a nuisance,’ he wrote in his 1995 letter to a Fayetteville, N.C., officer. ‘But please help me out of this mess.’

“Four years earlier, McKoy had been convicted of murdering Myron Hailey in a drug deal gone bad. McKoy, 18 years old at the time of his arrest, said he had heard rumors at the time that a man named William ‘Rat Rat’ Talley was truly responsible. Now McKoy named 10 people he thought might say as much to law enforcement.

“Police didn’t need McKoy’s help. As part of a federal task force investigating Fayetteville’s ‘Court Boys’ gang, the officer had already heard four cooperators name Talley as the shooter. And months before McKoy sent his letter, a federal prosecutor had stood up in court and told a jury in Talley’s drug trial that, even though he wasn’t charged with Hailey’s killing, Talley ‘shot him dead.’

“But despite the prosecutor’s declaration and new evidence McKoy and his attorneys presented — including that the sole eyewitness who testified at trial was unreliable and that a detective on his case was later convicted of taking bribes from drug dealers — he cannot clear his name.”

Additional reading:

The Marshall Project, October 20, 2015: Why is a Man Serving Life for a Murder that Feds Say Someone Else Committed?