After 35 years in prison, Charlie Vaughn is free
Vaughn, an Arkansas man with a severe intellectual disability, spent decades in prison for a murder he did not commit. He was finally released on Friday.
Charlie Vaughn’s story was the first piece of investigative journalism I published here at The Watch. It’s also one of the most devastating cases I’ve ever covered.
It’s a story about the perils of inadequate public defense, prosecutorial zeal, abuse of jailhouse informants, and a staggering denial of due process. But it also reflects the grave injustice of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), a law that has made it all but impossible for federal courts to address and correct many of those problems, and consequently has kept far too many innocent people behind prison walls.
Vaughn was convicted with three other people for the gruesome murder of 82-year-old Myrtle Holmes in the town of Fordyce, Arkansas in 1988. Holmes had been beaten, stabbed, and raped. After spending three years in jail awaiting trial, under threat of the death penalty, and on the advice of a court-appointed attorney with whom he had barely spoken — and who was paid $350 for the entirety of his representation — Vaughn confessed to the crime.
Though Vaughn has a severe intellectually disability and mental illness, it doesn’t appear that he was ever evaluated for mental competency before his confession. When an attorney did have him examined 25 years later, the mental health professional concluded that Vaughn was, “unequivocally one of the lowest functioning individuals I have ever seen,” and that Vaughn was “unable to perform simple math, interpret easy proverbs and sayings, or make simple change out of a dollar.”
In his confession, Vaughn also implicated three other people — two men and one woman — all of whom the police already suspected. All three were tried at the same time, and after a jury deadlocked at the first trial, all three were convicted at a second trial.
Vaughn’s confession conflicted with the evidence. Most importantly, he claimed that he and his two male co-defendants raped the woman. But while DNA testing at the time could not definitively implicate someone, it could exclude someone as the source of biological material. And the testing back then excluded Vaughn and one of his male co-defendants as the source of the sperm found in the victim.
Two decades later, attorneys for the Midwest Innocence Project and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University would go to court on behalf of Vaughn’s three co-defendants. Through their own investigation, they would establish the innocence of two of them — Tina Jimerson and John Brown. This was in part due to the 2015 confession of the other person convicted, Reginald Early.
Faced with new DNA testing that would likely have implicated him as the sole source of the semen, Early confessed. Unlike Vaughn’s confession, Early’s did not conflict with the known evidence. Early also said he acted alone, and barely knew his co-defendants. Early then added a chilling detail: He had considered confessing shortly after his arrest. He changed his mind when he saw that three people he knew had nothing to do with the crime had been charged as well. At that point, he said, he assumed the police and prosecutors didn’t know what they were doing. So he decided to take his chances at trial.
Because of AEDPA, even all of this wasn’t enough to immediately secure Jimerson and Brown’s release. It would take another three years of court battles to finally get their convictions overturned. They were released in the fall of 2018. Brown died of a heart attack two years later.
But Charlie Vaughn remained in prison for another decade. The reason: Back in 1995, with the help of a fellow prisoner, Vaughn had sent a handwritten letter to a federal court declaring his innocence, and asking to be released from prison. Under AEDPA, the courts considered this letter to be a pro se habeas petition. AEDPA only gives prisoners one crack at a post-conviction petition in federal court. That letter, sent without an attorney, was Vaughn’s one bite at the apple.
“I think about Charlie Vaughn every day,” Tricia Rojo Bushnell told me in 2022. At the time, Bushnell was director of the Midwestern Innocence Project. She is now the director of the Quattrone Center at Penn Law (where I am a journalism fellow). “I think about him sitting in a prison cell, and how utterly unfair and unjust it all is. The system failed him.”
Charles Oglesby was the first lawyer assigned to Vaughn’s case after he was arrested. “I’ll be the first to say I wasn’t ready for a case like that,” he told me. “But back then, if you were assigned an indigent case, you were expected to accept it unless you had a valid reason to withdraw. And lack of experience wasn't considered a valid reason.” He’d later tell me, “I want to think our system is just. I want to think it’s fair. So it hurts me to think about Charlie still sitting in prison. It hurts me as a lawyer. And it hurts me as a man.”
Michelle Tull is the grand-niece of Holmes. She now represents the family’s interests in the case. “I’ve spent a good deal of my own money investigating my great aunt’s murder,” she told me. “We don’t believe Charlie should be in prison. I’ve seen no evidence to convince me he’s guilty. He needs help and mental health care.”
I’m happy to report that as of today, Charlie Vaughn is free. He was released from prison late this morning. Unlike a lot of people who get out after such a long time behind bars, Vaughn will be entering the outside world with a lot of support, thanks to a childhood friend named Angelo Hempstead.
Hempstead’s own story is inspiring. He comes comes from a family in rural Arkansas who turned a small plot of land into a thriving farm, restaurant, and construction business. When Hempstead read that Vaughn had been wrongly convicted, he told his mother Ruby, the family matriarch. Ruby, who has since passed away, instructed her sons to reach out to Vaughns attorneys. She told them to tell Vaughn that should he ever get out, he will have a place live. He’ll get a free room, free meals, and should he want one, a paid job on the farm. At the time I published this, Charlie Vaughn was en route to his new home.
The road to that new home was a long one. Vaughn’s attorney today is Stuart Chanen, a Chicago-area lawyer. Bushnell and Karen Daniel, the late innocence attorney at Northwestern, reached out to Chanen after securing the release of Brown and Jimerson. Chanen first filed a petition in Arkansas courts and was denied. The courts ruled that Vaughn had missed the deadline to file his post-conviction petition and therefore had forfeited his right to do so. Chanen then turned to the federal courts. But because Vaughn had forfeited in state court, because of that letter he wrote in 1995, and because of his confession, he faced a higher burden than Brown or Jimerson. Chanen would first have to ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit for permission to file in the lower federal court. So he did. The court of appeals rejected the petition with a single sentence.
Chanen next filed for clemency with then-Arkansas governor Asa Hutchison. The state pardon board rejected the clemency request. Hutchison could have overruled, but he failed to act before leaving office. Chanen would need to re-file under new governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. That would be tall order. Sanders ran on a law-and-order platform, and her father, former governor Mike Huckabee, had taken a beating after granting clemency to a man who later ambushed and killed four police officers.
Still, in 2023 Chanen told me he had an encouraging meeting with Sanders’s chief counsel, and left thinking she had been moved by Vaughn’s story. He told me a receptionist in the office, noticing that he appeared nervous before the meeting, even told him that he had nothing to worry about, because the office was on his side. A month later, Chanen received an email from the office telling him Vaughn’s petition had been denied. The office gave no explanation.
“I’m just grief-stricken,” Chanen told me at the time. “If ever anyone were deserving of this, it’s Charlie Vaughn.”
I started working on Vaughn’s story in the last year or so of my time at the Washington Post. I was excited about the story. I worked for the Opinion section of the paper, but had been hired in part to do this sort of long-form, investigative reporting. But by that time the Opinion section had changed. Longtime editor Fred Hiatt had passed away, and the interim leadership (which, it turns out, would be temporary) wasn’t as interested in longform reporting, and seemed particularly uninterested in the issue I cover. So they refused to publish my story about Charlie Vaughn.
I’d be let go by the paper a short time later, and so Vaughn’s story became my first here at The Watch. Gratifyingly, my investigation won a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. It also prompted the ABA to recruit some legal assistance for Chanen.
AEDPA is an immensely complicated law. Chanen took Vaughn’s case pro bono, but conceded to me early on that he didn’t have a lot of experience in these sorts of cases. He’d also later concede that he made some mistakes. That’s entirely understandable — AEDPA is complicated by design, and the courts can be brutal about punishing clients if their attorneys fail to understand it and, say, miss a deadline, fail to uncover a piece of important evidence, or fail to create a record of said evidence at trial. So Chanen welcomed the legal help.
I’m going to write more on all of this later, so I don’t want to get too much into the weeds, but Arkansas is a notoriously difficult state when it comes to letting defendants back into court after they’ve exhausted their claims. Chanen has continued to file on Vaughn’s behalf, most recently based on an archaic state law that permits defendants, under extremely limited circumstances, to file a writ of error coram nobis, which if granted would allow a court to consider newly discovered evidence if they can show that said evidence could not have been previously discovered, and that it would have likely persuaded a jury to acquit.
The Arkansas courts have yet to rule on that writ, but in the process, Chanen did convince district attorney Jeffrey Rogers to take another look at Vaughn’s case. According to Chanen, Rogers’s office still thinks Vaughn had some role in the murder, but believes he may have been manipulated due to his intellectual disability, and that the general sentiment in the community is that 35 years is a sufficient sentence for whatever role he might have played. So Rogers offered to recommend Vaughn’s release if he accepts an Alford plea for first degree murder.
Under an Alford plea, prisoners can continue to protest their innocence, but they concede that the state has enough evidence to persuade a jury to convict. Vaughn agreed to the deal, and today a judge granted his release. He will be allowed to continue to fight in court to clear his name.
So this is only a partial victory. But it’s still an immensely rewarding one. A vulnerable man has suffered for 35 years in a maximum security prison for a crime he did not commit. Vaughn also suffers from mental illness. He’ll finally be able to get the help he needs. And he’ll finally get to begin living the life that was taken from him.
More to come.
You’re amazing, Radley. And our system of justice is decidedly NOT.
Thank you, Radley. Huge respect and gratitude for your tireless work on this and so many other stories. You're one of the best of us.