He went into a North Carolina prison in 1976 and came out in 2020. 44 years. Ronnie Long was tried by an all-white jury in front of an all-white courtroom, convicted, and sentenced to two life terms. The evidence that cleared him had been sitting in a police file the whole time. Concord, North Carolina. He was 20, and he was accused of raping a white widow — the wife of a local textile executive. The jury was all white. The judge ordered the jury pool assembled in a way that produced it. Long's lawyers objected and were overruled. Here is what the state had, and did not disclose: Forty-three fingerprints were lifted at the scene. None of them were his. The defence was not told. A rape kit had been collected. Hair and other evidence had been gathered and sent for analysis. Reports existed. The defence was not told, and much of the material later could not be found. The victim had initially failed to identify him, and the circumstances of the identification she eventually made were deeply questionable. He was convicted in 1976 and spent the next four and a half decades filing. Appeal after appeal, denied. For decades, courts told him his claims were procedurally too late — which is to say, he was too slow to complain about evidence nobody had told him existed. In August 2020 the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting as a full court, vacated his conviction and described the state's conduct as an extraordinary withholding of evidence. He walked out that month, aged 64. North Carolina's governor pardoned him. He received the state's maximum wrongful-conviction payment — which is capped at $750,000. For forty-four years. That is about seventeen thousand dollars a year. He had been inside longer than the lawyers who finally freed him had been alive.