Judge Denies Hearing for Former Pro Basketball Player Serving Two Life Terms

James Richardson, a Greenville man serving two life sentences for a 2009 drive-by double homicide he maintains he did not commit, spent much of the past year in a legal limbo familiar to many North Carolina prison inmates who contend they were wrongfully convicted.

The post-conviction defense team for the former NBA developmental league and European pro basketball player offered hope after turning up new evidence they contend pokes holes in the prosecution’s case, as The Assembly has reported extensively before.

That optimism was further buoyed in August 2025, when Richardson’s attorneys gave Judge Henry W. Hight Jr. an overview of their findings. They argued a full evidentiary hearing was warranted to present their best case for overturning the convictions.

Hight delivered a blow, though, when he rejected all of Richardson’s claims in a signed court order dated September 24, 2025, that was only filed in court Tuesday—almost 10 months later.

The defense team doesn’t know why the order was not made public sooner. As those lawyers work to unravel that mystery, they plan to appeal the ruling and continue their fight for Richardson, now 49 and serving two life terms in Warren Correctional Institution.

“The court’s ruling is a setback, not an end,” Abraham Rubert-Schewel, a civil rights attorney on the defense team, said in a statement. “The Pitt County District Attorney’s Office should welcome a hearing on the merits if, as they’ve suggested, they are interested in reaching the truth of what happened. To date, they haven’t, so the work continues. Keeping an innocent man in prison does not afford Mr. Richardson or the victims’ families the justice and fairness they deserve.” 

Joel Stadiem, who represented the Pitt County district attorney’s office during the 2025 proceedings, argued against a rehearing. He contended the defense team had not turned up substantive information that wasn’t already available to them at trial, and essentially were trying to get another go at the case with hopes for a different outcome.

Seventeen years have passed since a jury convicted Richardson of two counts of first-degree murder of Andrew Kirby, 29, and Landon Blackley, 21, in a drive-by shooting outside a downtown Greenville nightclub on June 30, 2009. Richardson had no prior criminal record. 

The prosecution argued that Richardson, who had been at a club near the fatal incidents that night, acted alone and fired shots from a white BMW into a crowd gathered outside the Other Place nightclub. They argued he was the only occupant in the car. 

Among other things, Richardson’s post-conviction team contends that:

• During jury deliberations, a Black juror “faced pressure fueled by racial animus” to change his vote to convict, a claim Hight described as “merely speculative.”
  
• The only witness to testify at trial that he saw Richardson shooting out of a white BMW told a defense team investigator in 2017 that he had not seen a face or person, that he only saw an arm wielding a gun outside the rear passenger window, and that there were three or four people in the car. Hight discounted that narrative as one that, when “viewed contextually,” was “not a recantation of his trial testimony.”
  
• That prosecutors withheld evidence favorable to the defense before trial. The judge either disagreed or found this claim not to be consequential enough to order a new trial.

“We strongly disagree with the court’s ruling and are incredibly disappointed by it,” Jake Sussman, chief counsel for justice reform at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a civil rights organization advocating for Richardson, said in a statement. “We have critical evidence and witnesses that the jury never heard before it wrongly convicted James Richardson of crimes that he did not commit. Mr. Richardson deserves a fair day in court, something he has never been afforded, where no one is hiding the ball. It is a miscarriage of justice to deny him that opportunity yet again.” 

The Assembly has has reported on Richardson’s claims that low-quality surveillance video presented at trial was misleading and obscured critical details that could have aided Richardson in his defense.

A mounting movement from Pitt County and beyond has championed Richardson’s cause, using letter-writing campaigns and phone trees. Among those supporting Richardson is Dontae Sharpe, who spent 24 years in prison for murder before a judge vacated his conviction in Pitt County in 2019 after finding out a critical witness had fabricated his testimony.

Darron Carmon, who spent eight years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of armed robbery—also in Pitt County—was in the courtroom in August to support Richardson. It took Carmon 28 years to get his conviction vacated. He is scheduled to be the featured speaker at a prayer vigil for Richardson Friday, July 17, outside the Pitt County courthouse.