RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) – The Virginia Supreme Court denied the state’s effort to overturn a judge’s ruling exonerating a Norfolk man imprisoned for 20 years mainly based on testimony a key witness later said was coerced by a corrupt ex-detective tied to other wrongful convictions.
Gilbert Merritt was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2001 for the 2000 murder of Vincent Burdette “based almost entirely” on false witness testimony that he confessed to the killing, a lower court wrote in a ruling vacating his convictions.
Nearly two decades later, the witness said the case’s senior investigator Robert Glenn Ford, a former Norfolk detective later sentenced to more than 12 years in federal prison, told her what to say on the stand and promised to help her avoid a potential 80-year sentence on drug charges she was facing.
Pointing to a lack of evidence, inconsistent statements and other “red flags” in the case in interviews with 8News, attorneys who worked to free and exonerate Merritt expressed surprise over the initial decision to prosecute him.
But the fact the state pushed to have Merritt’s legal effort to clear his name thrown out of court and then appealed the ruling exonerating him to the state’s highest court confused and frustrated them.
“Detective Ford has left a really long trail of destruction in his wake,” said Jim Neale, a litigation partner at McGuireWoods who took on Merrit’s exoneration case. “His penchant for misconduct, his disrespect for the process is, I think, really evident. And it was discouraging to us that the state defended these allegations to the extent they did.”
Merritt’s release and effort to clear his name
After the witness recanted her testimony, first in interviews with the Innocence Project from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2019 and then in a 2020 sworn statement, Merritt was released in 2022 on a conditional pardon from then-Gov. Ralph Northam.
While it led to his release, the pardon meant Merritt would be under state supervision.
University of Virginia law professor Juliet Hatchett, the associate director of UVA’s law school’s Innocence Project Clinic, which played a vital role in Merritt’s release and exoneration, told 8News that while Merritt has done well to adjust since his release, being under supervision can be “very stressful.”
Merritt filed a petition in Norfolk Circuit Court to vacate his convictions for murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, arguing that evidence was withheld in the case and false testimony was knowingly presented in his trial.
The move led to a two-day evidentiary hearing in March 2022 in which the witness again said Ford told her to lie about Merritt confessing and what he was wearing, the color of the gun and the vehicle he used at the time.
Merritt, who maintained his innocence and refused plea deals during the prosecution, said he was at the hospital the day Burdette was killed as his brother was in surgery after being shot.
“It’s one that was just so thin at the time of the conviction,” Hatchett said about the case she worked on for more than four years. “And there were so many red flags to it that it is, I think, surprising looking back now that this prosecution was ever pursued in the first place. And once we started investigating and litigating things fell apart pretty quickly.”
According to the court’s order, an eyewitness for his defense said they saw someone else running from the scene of the murder.
Merritt’s release came 11 years after Ford was sentenced to 12 years and six months after being convicted on federal charges that included extortion, conspiracy and making false statements to the FBI, conduct that partly took place during the investigation and Merritt’s prosecution.
The federal court determined Ford began engaging in misconduct in the 1990s, abusing “his power and the public trust.”
Ford, who has since been released, was also found to have taken bribes and extracted false confessions, according to a 2023 release from Norfolk’s top prosecutor announcing a “conviction integrity review” of all his closed cases.
This includes, the release adds, eliciting false confessions in high-profile cases, including from a group of four sailors wrongfully convicted of rape and murder in 1997 known as the “Norfolk Four.” All four were eventually released and settled with the city of Norfolk and the state.
A ruling and the state’s decision to fight it
In the court order vacating Merritt’s conviction, the judge wrote that she found the witness to be credible and Ford not to be. The judge pointed to inconsistencies in Ford’s testimony at the murder trial and his deposition in Merritt’s exoneration case.
“The Court finds that the preponderance of the evidence in this case establishes that Ford’s conduct was aimed at engineering a specific outcome in which Merritt would be wrongfully convicted and Ford would take credit for solving a murder,” Judge Mary Jane Hall wrote in the 2022 order.
The Virginia Parole Board and its then-chair Chadwick Dotson, named as defendants in the petition and represented by the attorney general’s office, sought to have the case thrown out of Norfolk Circuit Court.
The state then appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which affirmed the lower court’s ruling to exonerate Merritt in a Feb. 15 ruling.
The high court agreed with the circuit court in rejecting the parole board’s arguments that, among others, Merritt did not file his petition in time, that his pardon stripped him of his right to habeas corpus relief and that he could not bring forward new claims in his petition.
“I respect the adversarial process in litigation, but I would note that all of the arguments on appeal were procedural arguments,” Hatchett said, calling it “frustrating” and “disheartening at times” to litigate on a case and not see “a desire to engage in the substance of the claims.”
Questions remain unanswered
Only the state can share why it “chose to appeal the way it did,” Neale said, acknowledging that it is possible the state challenged Merritt’s efforts to protect itself from a potential civil lawsuit.
He added that while the attorney general’s office has to defend the state’s interests, he hoped “prosecutors doing the right thing would trump that.”
Patricia West, the parole board’s current chair, told 8News that despite being named as a defendant, the board wasn’t involved in the appeal process and didn’t have anything to share on the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision.
Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Jason Miyares’ (R) office, declined to comment on the appeal and the high court’s decision.
Merritt’s case isn’t the only one with ties to Ford that the state has fought. Kevin Lamont Knight was convicted of a 2002 Norfolk murder investigated by Ford in which witnesses recanted their testimony.
The Innocence Project filed a petition for a writ of actual innocence to clear his name, which the attorney general’s office under Democrat Mark Herring fought against and was denied by the Court of Appeals of Virginia in 2020. Knight was eventually released on a conditional pardon in 2022.
Neale told 8News that as far as he knows, the state has “always fought tooth and nail to preserve” Ford’s convictions.
“I think that’s really difficult to accept or justify,” he said.
Hatchett and Neale also told 8News they don’t believe the state has fully reviewed of all of Ford’s convictions. Hatchett was clear that she wasn’t suggesting that every case Ford handled was incorrect, but questioned how he “got away with what he did for so long in a system that should be set up to control” police like him.
LaCivita did not respond to follow-up questions about whether the state has ordered a review of all of Ford’s convictions.
Merritt’s case is the second exoneration tied to a Ford investigation that the Innocence Project has worked on, Hatchett said, and the clinic is currently working on other cases linked to his work.
Neale told 8News that he understands the need for finality in the proceedings and that families of the victims “deserve as much peace and comfort as they can possibly get.”
“But I almost think the state’s continued obstinateness or refusal to acknowledge even the possibility that Ford engaged in systemic misconduct, to be denying those victims’ families what they really deserve,” he said. “None of them want the wrong people in prison.”
