Slaughtering The Innocent: A New NC Law Will Keep Innocent People Locked Up
A note from Phillip: This memoir is based on factual events. I have tried my best to recreate what happened to the best of my recollection, but forgive me if something seems inaccurate. I'll the story exactly how I remember it.
On December 1, 2025, a new North Carolina law will impose a seven-year statute of limitations on incarcerated people who want to challenge their convictions through a legal action called a Motion for Appropriate Relief (MAR). An MAR is the first step in any post-conviction appeal to state or federal courts. Setting a limitation ensures that wrongfully convicted people in North Carolina won't be able to prove their innocence if they cannot do so within that timeframe, forever closing the door on their freedom.
I know the harm this law will inflict, because I met an innocent incarcerated man long before I ever saw the inside of a jail or prison.
In the spring of 1999, I was 21 and hanging out with Kristin, one of my best friends. I had known Kristin for a few years by then. She was a pretty white girl with long brown hair and big brown eyes. She laughed at everything and had a way of making me laugh, too, even when I didn't want to.
One Saturday morning, I drove us to the Wake County Jail on Salisbury Street in downtown Raleigh to visit a friend who was awaiting trial. When we got there, we found out that he'd already had a visit that day, so we couldn't see him.
"What do you want to do now?" I asked on the walk back to the car. She didn't answer. She was staring at the pavement. "Kristin?"
She suddenly stopped walking. "Will you take me to see my dad?"
Until then, Kristin had never mentioned her dad. She kept a framed photo of the two of them together at Disney World on her bedside table, but when I asked about him, she waved a little and said he lived in a galaxy far, far away. Since she never spoke about him, I stopped asking.
"Yeah. We can see your pops. How far is his place from here?"
Kristin bit her lips. Her hands dug deep into the back pockets of her jeans. "He's in jail." Her eyes glossed over with slick tears that refused to fall. "He's been in state prisons for like six years, but he came back to the county for an appeal hearing. They'll send him back to prison in a few days. I just thought that since we're already here ..."
I cupped her forearm in my hand. "You don't have to explain." A part of me wanted to wipe her tears before they had a chance to fall. Instead, I flipped her a crooked smile. "I want to meet him anyway. C'mon. Let's go back."
Inside the jail, we sat on round steel stools in a visitation cubicle. Blow Pop and Jolly Rancher wrappers stuck to the bottom of my New Balances. Kid-sized fingerprints smudged the dingy glass separating us from lockup.
I watched Kristin, who sat still with her thin legs pressed together, hands clasped in her lap, eyes downcast. It was the first time I had ever seen her without a smile, or at least a playful half-smile.
Soon after, a train of men wearing pumpkin-orange jumpsuits shuffled off an elevator linked on a long chain by silvery handcuffs. An officer loosed them one by one, and they weaved through the labyrinth of cubicles searching for familiar faces. A middle-aged white guy with a bad bowl cut headed toward us. He and Kristin could have been twins.
I nudged her with my elbow. "He's here."
She looked up just in time to see him sit. Both picked up black phone receivers to talk, but neither smiled. I couldn't hear what he said, but he spoke in paragraphs. Kristin stared at his chest, replying with subdued single words: Yeah. Okay. No.
Watching them reminded me of awkward conversations with my own dad who lived a thousand miles away in Chicago. Years of silence often passed between us. We had to relearn each other within his five-minute calls that came every other birthday or every third Christmas. He never apologized for the years he missed. "I bet you gettin big, boy!" He'd say. "You gotta girl yet? Make sure you call when you visit your Mammaw and Grandad so I can take you out for pizza." I responded with the same dull answers as Kristin — Yeah. No. Sure. — because I didn't know what else to say to a stranger that wouldn't keep his word.
When a guard shouted for the prisoners to wrap it up, Kristin's dad blew her a kiss, then went back to jail.
Questions about her dad burned my lips on the way back to the car, but Kristin didn't say a word, so I left it alone.
"You wanna go to that fondue place you like on Wake Forest Road? We can make white chocolate pretzels."
"I guess," she said, but nothing else.
To fill the void of silence, I reminded her of the time we were tripping on LSD with our friend Erin. They talked me into going to the Waffle House at three a.m. They ordered $50 worth of scrambled eggs, waffles, and hash browns — scattered, smothered, and covered — but they didn't eat one bite (you don't get an appetite on LSD). Their laughter shook the windows when they told me that they had no money. We gave “Dine and Dash” a new meaning that night.
Kristin didn't even crack a smile.
Once in the car, she put a hand on mine to stop me from cranking the engine.
"He didn't do it, Phill. I swear he didn't. He'll be coming home soon. You'll see. And they'll regret what they did to us." Her chest heaved from the outburst, but this time she wasn't crying. Her fists curled tight in her lap.
"Alright," I said. "Tell me what happened."
Kristin's dad, Greg Taylor, was convicted of murder in 1993 for the slaying of a Black, female sex worker whose body was found down the street from his parked Nissan Pathfinder in southeast Raleigh. Although Taylor maintained his innocence — saying that his SUV had gotten stuck in the mud after a night of partying — he was still sent to prison for life. That was about all Kristin knew.
Then in 2009, nearly seven years after my own conviction for mùrder, I saw Kristin on the news talking about her dad's case.
She never gave up, I thought.
Months later, Greg Taylor's conviction was thrown out after his case had been picked up by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, which reviewed claims of actual innocence before handing over the most plausible cases to a three-judge panel to either uphold or overturn.
Taylor won exoneration after proving that an agent with the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) falsely testified about blood splatter evidence supposedly found on the bumper of his SUV. He had told the commission that an unusual substance was the victim's blood. But following an investigation, the commission discovered that the test results of the so-called blood had been ruled inconclusive, and the substance likely wasn't blood at all. The "blood" was the only physical evidence linking Taylor to the crime.
As a result, the SBI agent was fired. His testimony in a different case, the high-profile Michael Peterson case, was also thrown out, freeing Peterson from a life sentence after he had served eight years for killing his wife in Durham.
On September 24, 2009, I was watching the 6 p.m. news on WRAL in a dayroom at Central Prison when Greg Taylor was released. He went to the studio for a live interview wearing an ill-fitting black suit and prison-issue eyeglasses. A news reporter asked him if the wrongful conviction angered him.
"Anger's out the door a long time ago," he said. "You can't survive for any length of time on bitterness and blame."
The profundity of his words compelled me to run to my cell and scribble them down in a book of quotes that I still have. Of all the quotes I've collected from books by Sun Tzu, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Frederich Nietzsche, the one from Greg Taylor means the most because he conquered the same cages that I now inhabit with dignity.
Throughout 23 years of incarceration, I have met only one person who knew Greg Taylor. My friend Popjack (his nickname) was at Franklin Correctional with him. Popjack told me that the Innocence Inquiry Commission had initially refused to take Taylor's case. So he wrote them again. And again. And again. Until they finally agreed to investigate his claims. His persistence paid off. Taylor became the first person to be exonerated by the commission.
In all, Taylor served 17 years for a crime he didn't commit — 17 years apart from his daughter Kristin who suffered his absence as much as him.
If the new law limiting the time convicted people have to file an MAR had existed when Taylor was fighting his case, he would have never been exonerated. The Innocence Inquiry Commission didn't take his case until 14 years after his conviction, which would be seven years past the new statute of limitations.
To make matters worse, the GOP-led North Carolina General Assembly wants to shut down the Innocence Inquiry Commission, which would prevent innocent people like Taylor from getting the help they need to seek freedom.
Both law changes were proposed by the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys, a lobbying group made up of every elected district attorney in the state. From what I've seen over the years, the Conference of District Attorneys regularly opposes any criminal justice reform legislation that limits the power of prosecutors. They propose legislation that forces people to serve more time or that infringes on a defendant's constitutional rights. No one should be shocked by that. It's wholly consistent with their political stance. Whether Democrat or Republican, law enforcement officials always seem to unite against so-called criminals to support tough-on-crime policies. It's wholly consistent with their political position, but not a moral one.
I can't imagine any prosecutor fist pumping the air when someone they put away for life is exonerated after 20 years because they were actually innocent. The easiest way to prevent that from happening is to thwart a convicted person's ability to challenge their conviction in the first place. That way, their claims of innocence will die in prison, along with them, if they don't have the resources to fight their case.
The innocent aren't the only people affected by the new statute of limitations. An MAR is used to challenge a conviction for any constitutional violation: ineffective assistance of counsel, excessive sentencing, and jurisdictional issues, to name a few. Successful challenges result in freedom or a sentence reduction.
I filed two MARs on my own because I couldn't afford an attorney, and one after I found an attorney willing to take my case pro bono.
The first, filed in 2004, read more like a letter written by a fifth grader than a legal document, because I had no idea what I was doing. At 26, and with only a GED, I pieced together a bastardized argument with decades-old law books and hand-me-down case law (sometimes copied by hand) because North Carolina prisons had no law library. The judge denied the MAR, finding that I had offered no new evidence. He denied it with prejudice, meaning I couldn't argue the same issues in subsequent filings, what legal professionals call a “procedural bar.”
The procedural bar allowed judges in later MARs, in 2015 and 2023, to deny my claims without a hearing, including when my attorney forwarded newly discovered evidence that I had been trying to get from the district attorney’s office for two decades.
The procedural bar blocked any chances I had of rectifying my conviction through the courts and serves as another tool to prevent people from challenging their convictions.
That fact doesn't prove problematic for many legal professionals who argue for finality in criminal convictions. This notion of finality seeks to end any challenges to a conviction after a certain length of time or a series of appeals. Conservatives on the United States Supreme Court have consistently held that finality must overrule opportunity to continue challenging a conviction, even in cases where a prior law has recently been ruled unconstitutional. In one case, SCOTUS opined, "The past cannot always be erased by a new judicial declaration.”
I disagree. If something is considered unconstitutional now, it must have also been unconstitutional 20 years ago. There's no time limit on injustice. If something is wrong, it has always been wrong. A legal doctrine can't change that.
But North Carolina's new statute of limitations on MARs closes the door on justice after seven years, even if the convicted person is actually innocent, like Greg Taylor.
I lost contact with Kristin after the summer of 1999, but I still have a News & Observer newspaper clipping of her inside the Wake County Courthouse crying as she reaches to embrace her mom after learning of the Innocence Inquiry Commission's vote to release her dad.
It's not the only picture of her that I have. My favorite is one of her sitting in my car, grinning as if I had just told the funniest joke in the world. The picture was taken in the summer of 1999. The image depicts how I remember her: happy and enjoying life. Yet when I really think about it, she looks happier in the newspaper clipping where she's crying her eyes out after hearing that her father is coming home.