BALTIMORE — This was the moment James Langhorne and his family had waited for. He's free, and they're reunited for good.
“I worked 30 years to get to this point, so I'm gonna enjoy every moment, and put that anger behind me,” James Langhorne told a room of reporters at a Thursday afternoon press conference. He was joined by representatives from the State’s Attorney’s Office and the Innocence Project in announcing his release from prison after a hearing this past Monday.
Langhorne had been locked up since he was 23-years-old. He’s now 51 and has grandchildren.
Back in 1996, his life was just getting started. But a murder that had occurred three years earlier would bring everything to a screeching halt.
“There was a ton of pressure on police to solve this murder. It had gone cold. Making an arrest was a really big deal,” Shawn Armbrust, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which assisted Langhorne with his case, said during the press conference.
In November 1993, Laurence Jones was shot and killed in the former Perkins Homes neighborhood of Baltimore. Years later, a jailhouse informant hoping for a sweeter deal, and a couple of corroborating witnesses led police to Langhorne.
“There were no witnesses to the murder itself, and officers recovered no physical evidence of value at the scene,” Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates said on Thursday.
Langhorne fought his conviction for years. Finally, in 2019, came a glimmer of hope. A new unit in the state's attorney's office dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted agreed to take a fresh look at his case.
The investigation was far from easy, and it took Lauren Lipscomb and her team in the conviction integrity unit five years to complete.
“So if you can imagine that even the case back in the 90s was an incredibly difficult case for the police to investigate, I think you probably could imagine - increase that by 150%, of the difficulty it is to then go back and attempt to investigate that case present-day,” Lipscomb said.
“Some of these witnesses, they had to chase all the way to New Zealand, because they had moved,” Bates said.
They discovered unreliable witnesses, inconsistent testimony, and new evidence to clear his name. One witness said police bribed him with drug money to get him to cooperate. Another said police coached her with a "script" of what to say, and threatened to take her kids away from her if she didn't do as she was told. There were also alternate suspects the defense didn't know about.
Over the course of her work, Armbrust was stuck was by how flimsy the case seemed to people even back then: “The prosecutor said on the record to a reporter, that the case was weak. One of the jurors, again said on the record to a reporter that she was worried that they might have convicted an innocent man. The judge’s questions at the hearing on Monday really drove that home again. He seemed almost baffled that the case against Mr. Langhorne had even moved forward.”
In the beginning of this year, the State's Attorney's Office moved to reverse his conviction. On Monday, a judge agreed. Notably, the victim's family agreed too, saying in their victim impact statement that Mr. Langhorne was a victim too, according to Bates.
“They did something that most of us wouldn't be able to do, which is to open our minds to the idea that this thing we believed, this thing that gave us a sense of closure after a truly awful, tragic experience, that thing that got us through that time isn't true,” Armbrust said. “The willingness to allow those old wounds to be reopened was really courageous and it really matters.”
“They truly are a class family. They understood that they were angry almost 30 years ago when Mr. Langhorne was accused, they had a lot of anger towards him. However, I think when Lauren Lipscomb had the opportunity to sit down and go over the evidence that we had with the family, they now have decided, and [wrote it] in their victim impact letter, that yes, Mr. Langhorne is also a victim and should not have been found guilty. I think that’s a testament to them as a family, but also to the amount of work that Lauren Lipscomb and her entire team were able to produce."
“I know it took a lot, you know, years that passed - evidence isn’t easy to retrieve in these situations after so long, and they did it. I’m forever grateful to you,” Langhorne said Thursday, thanking the State’s Attorney’s Office and the Innocence Project.
He also thanked his attorney of close to 20 years, Daniel Wright, who Langhorne says continued helping him even after he retired from practicing law: “He never asked me for a dime; he believed in me. He convinced me to hold on. Mr. Daniel J. Wright did so many things for me, that he's not an attorney, he's something else, close to an angel.”
The case will now be reopened. Lipscomb said she turned it over to the cold case unit in the State's Attorney's Office.
