Police grew interested in the investigation again in 1994 when they reached out to Charles Blackwell, a police informant who was serving time in prison for an unrelated crime.
Blackwell was charged with Compton’s murder after he changed his original statement. In his revised statement, Blackwell said he had been in Compton’s house with Armstrong the day of her murder. Blackwell said he left the residence when Armstrong began struggling with Compton over a sum of money.
Blackwell was charged with being an accessory to murder on the condition that he testified that Armstrong committed the murder — a plea bargain he accepted.
Armstrong was arrested and charged with Compton’s slaying on April 14, 1994. Prosecutors offered him deals of as few as 15 years in prison in exchange for pleading guilty — plea bargains he refused to accept. Armstrong never relented. He was innocent.
By the time Armstrong’s trial came, Blackwell had already written to prosecutors and a local civil rights agency admitting he had fabricated the statements about Armstrong’s involvement in Compton’s murder. During the trial, police never told the judge or prosecutors that they paid Blackwell $200 for his testimony in the case.
Blackwell’s recant didn’t seem to matter. A jury convicted Armstrong on August 18, 1995. He was sentenced to life in prison.
It was during a phone conversation with his mother that Armstrong finally realized his biggest mistake during his original trial.
“I said, ‘Listen, when you sent me into that courtroom ... you sent a dummy in there,’” he said. “The only thing I really went in with was the sure confidence that I was innocent .”
Armstrong is very quick to say he’s not a UNC fan.
He used to be. He loved the boys in blue. He believed in the Tar Heel spirit.
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After his conviction, Armstrong said he begged students and professors at the UNC School of Law to help him get his sentence overturned.
When Armstrong’s case made it to the Duke Wrongful Convictions Clinic more than 15 years later , a fire was finally lit.
“He just wrote,” said Theresa Newman, a director at the clinic and one of the lawyers representing Armstrong during his second trial. “He wrote to everyone in an effort to try and get released.”
Armstrong said when Newman got involved with his case, he knew things would start looking up for him.
For one thing, no one had ever visited Armstrong in prison on his birthday.
No one, that is, until Newman came along.
“All I did was sing him “Happy Birthday” — that’s such a small gift,” Newman said. “I would be bitter and angry and self-pity, and he’s just not. He’s just not.”
Newman also came bearing gifts that day — She brought a tape recording of Blackwell recanting his original testimony. That recording would play a key role in exonerating Armstrong.
The Wrongful Convictions Clinic filed a motion to overturn Armstrong’s original conviction in December 2011. The Guilford County District Attorney’s Office agreed to a hearing of the clinic’s case in March 2012 .
The DNA evidence that prosecutors used to convict Armstrong during the first trial was the same DNA evidence lawyers at the clinic used to free him.
During the original investigation, police recovered a palm print from the door frame above where Compton was found dead. No lawyers from either side ever brought up this print during Armstrong’s original trial.
With newer, sophisticated technology, the lawyers at the Duke Wrongful Convictions Clinic were able to prove that the palm print matched to Christopher Bernard Caviness , a man police had considered a suspect during the original investigation.
The court granted Armstrong a new trial on June 29, 2012 — a move that allowed him to be released from prison.
Armstrong was sitting in the same courtroom in which he had been convicted when Superior Court Judge Joe Turner turned over his conviction. It felt like he had come full circle.
“(Armstrong’s case is the) closest to knowing I’m doing justice in my career I will ever experience,” Turner said during the trial.
On March 18, 2013, the prosecution finally dismissed the charge after new DNA testing failed to indicate Armstrong’s involvement.
There is no method to the cases the Wrongful Convictions Clinic wins, Newman said.
“We don’t make judgments when we first start,” she said. “We just start, and we see it where it takes us. And we were right with this one.”
Nine months later, Gov. Pat McCrory signed Armstrong’s pardon of innocence.
Freedom and innocence
Armstrong will be the first to tell you that just because you’re free doesn’t make you innocent.
See, to qualify for state reimbursement funds of up to $750,000, Armstrong needed McCrory to sign that pardon.
“I don’t know if it’s a lot of money or what, or how you want to consider it,” Armstrong said. “There’s no way they would attempt to really try to make up for what they have done. And then you know what? They can’t.”
“Money is not the issue. Money does not put back those years I lost with my daughter or my son, where my granddaughter was born. Or the fact I lost Mom and Dad both. You can’t put me back at the bedside at the hospital.”
For every year Armstrong wrongfully sat in prison, he was entitled to $50,000 from the state. The compensation is capped at $750,000.
“What they’re saying is if you were in the street today, how much are you worth — at least fifty grand,” Armstrong said. “Who was to know I’d be fifty grand?”
In March, Armstrong went before the N.C. Industrial Commission to request the full $750,000 in compensation from the state.
The commission granted Armstrong the full monetary compensation with little discussion. The commission has adjudicated 25 erroneous conviction claims since 1997, said Sumit Gupta, general counsel for the commission.
“The reason I’m not excited or ecstatic — this is something I should have had 20 years ago,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong also qualified for a program that allowed him to go back to school for free.
This summer, he finished a certification program to become a counselor to work with patients who struggle with addiction. The certificate complements the bachelor’s he had before imprisonment, and he’s now considering getting his master’s.
A prisoner’s hands
Armstrong is sitting at a table in the back of a Bob Evans diner — the same diner where he first received the call from McCrory about his signed pardon.
Every few minutes, his smartphone vibrates or rings. He stares at the phone and whispers that it must be someone else’s phone going off. He doesn’t recognize the different ringtones.
“It’s been a trip trying to adjust to all this crap right here,” Armstrong says, pushing down too hard on the touch screen, trying to get the phone to respond to his confusion.
Getting his master’s is something Armstrong wants, but he’s not sure he can handle the commitment just yet.
“I never could type well,” he said, mimicking the motions typists used on traditional typewriters instead of the laptops and tablets of today.
“I’ve had all these sports injuries,” he said, turning over his hands and examining his fingers. They’re rough and mangled. A working man’s hands. An athlete’s hands. A prisoner’s hands. “The ball has done everything to me but broke my neck.”
But Armstrong isn’t one to let things beat him. In fact, addiction is something Armstrong knows well.
As a counselor at Treatment Accountability for Safer Communities in the Coastal Horizons Center in Durham, he sees the pain of addiction in his clients everyday.
Before his wrongful conviction, Armstrong had been arrested for smaller crimes like larceny and shoplifting, possession of narcotics, assault and resisting arrest by a law enforcement officer. Armstrong said these convictions were related to drug abuse.
“About seven months before I went to prison, I got clean, hopefully for the last time,” Armstrong said. “The thought of drinking or drugging really doesn’t even go across the way ever since I’ve been home.”
But resisting the allure of addiction isn’t always easy for Armstrong.
“One time, I said to myself, ‘I ought to do this and do this and get blasted. So what? Who could really say anything?’ And then I thought about, would that answer my question? Would that solve my problem?”
Taking his ‘hops’
When the governor asked Armstrong what it was that prison took from him, Armstrong immediately knew.
“They took my hops.”
For a lifelong basketball player, hops are everything.
They are the reason people get out of their seats at games. They are the reason a dunk is infinitely cooler than a lay-up. They are a symbol of absolute freedom — a freedom that not even gravity can contain.
“I told the governor,” Armstrong said. “When I walked in there, I could stand up under the basketball goal, inside the lane, take two steps — one, two — and jump straight up under the rim and grab the rim and do a couple of pullups. At 45, I could still do this. But guess what? I can’t do it today. I can still shoot the ball, and I shoot it well. But no hops.”
By the end, you still want Armstrong to be angry. He has told you his story, but he never really railed against the North Carolina justice system. It hasn’t taken days; it took just a few hours.
You want him to hate his story.
But Armstrong wants to rebuild relationships. North Carolina already took so much from him. Armstrong said he won’t let it take anything else.
Because Armstrong isn’t angry. He doesn’t scream. And he would never hate.
city@dailytarheel.com
