The Docket: Another Year Behind Bars

Charles McNeair started 2025 the same way as the last 45 new years—behind prison walls. Many of his supporters had hoped things would be different by now, but former Gov. Roy Cooper left office without granting McNeair’s petition for clemency. 

“I’m not going to lie,” said Wanda Cox, one of McNeair’s fiercest advocates. “We all truly expected it this time because there’s nothing that should prevent him from being freed.” 

As we reported in 2023, McNeair was a poor, illiterate 16-year-old when he was arrested and charged with breaking into a 57-year-old white woman’s home and raping her. The case has raised troubling questions about the role of racism in his prosecution and sentencing. 

Just a few months before his arrest, the Ku Klux Klan marched through the city, handing out pamphlets. Butch Zimmerman, the elected district attorney, had a documented history of racism and was known to entertain defense attorneys with stories of slaveowners raping enslaved Black women. 

It also appears the Lexington Police Department destroyed the criminal investigative file, which may have provided insight on whether detectives thoroughly investigated the allegations. There’s no clear indication that detectives obtained any physical evidence, including a rape kit. And Lexington police detectives, without any definitive evidence, had also tried to link McNeair to four other unsolved attacks on white women; McNeair was ultimately never charged in three of the assaults and was acquitted of a fourth. 

McNeair has always claimed innocence and said he only pleaded guilty to second-degree rape and breaking and entering after his attorney told him he risked the death penalty if he went to trial. That wasn’t true, but McNeair had no way of knowing that. He ended up with a life sentence for a crime that, if he were convicted today, would only garner a 10-year sentence. 

Cox said McNeair was hurt when he heard that Cooper had not commuted his sentence. 

“But then he bounded back, and said, ‘You know, I’ve been turned down for parole since 1991. This is not the first time I’ve been told no,’” she said. 

For the last two years, Cox and other supporters have held rallies and marches in Lexington and Raleigh, and gotten the Lexington City Council to endorse his case for clemency. Now, they’re going to turn their attention to newly-elected Gov. Josh Stein; Cox said she has already asked for a meeting. 

There are still a lot of questions about how pending clemency petitions, including McNeair’s, will be handled by the new administration. Kate Frauenfelder, communications director for Stein, did not immediately respond to questions from The Assembly. 

Cox said right now, they are still hoping for an intervention.

“Wait and see is a very difficult thing for someone who has served 45 years,” she said. 

—Michael Hewlett

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Deal or No Deal Part II

A judge dismissed a charge against a Wake County man after finding that a prosecutor withheld possibly exonerating evidence from him and used it as leverage to coerce a guilty plea.

Superior Court Judge A. Graham Shirley wrote in an order issued November 25 that Assistant District Attorney Robert Stewart violated rules governing prosecutors’ duties to turn over exculpatory, or favorable, evidence to a defendant. 

As we wrote last year, Alden Rasmussen and a co-defendant, whose name is redacted in court documents, were arrested on June 16, 2023, by Holly Springs police officers. Those officers seized 7.1 grams of fentanyl and 9.5 grams of methamphetamine. The two men were later indicted on drug-trafficking charges. But Rasmussen claimed he was innocent of the drug-trafficking charges and that his co-defendant was his drug dealer. 

As proof, his attorney, William Finn Jr. provided Stewart with text messages between the two and screenshots of Cash App receipts, including one for $400. At the time of his arrest, Rasmussen was also heard telling his co-defendant to “do the right thing” and own up to all the drugs that the police seized. The co-defendant didn’t and by late November, he had already entered into a plea bargain, the details of which are redacted in Shirley’s order. 

Finn filed motions requesting complete discovery from Stewart, but Stewart failed to comply, resulting in at least two motions hearings, one in March and another in July. Shirley said Stewart knew that Finn’s motion would be granted yet still withheld favorable evidence. And during a February 27 meeting, Stewart implied he would pull a plea deal for Rasmussen if Rasmussen insisted on requesting discovery. 

The withheld discovery included notes from Stewart about an interview he and a law-enforcement officer had with the co-defendant, in which the other man confirmed that Rasmussen had sent him $400 to purchase drugs. Stewart also had withheld cellphone messages between the co-defendant and other third-parties, including his drug supplier, the order said. 

When Rasmussen rejected the plea deal after the February 27, 2024 meeting, Stewart sought an indictment for being a habitual felon, which would expose Rasmussen to additional time if he was found guilty of the charge. 

Shirley dismissed the indictment for being an habitual offender with prejudice, meaning Stewart cannot seek the charge again. He also ordered Stewart to turn over all discovery to Finn within 10 days of his order.

Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said Stewart has been a prosecutor in her office for three years and has spent less than a year in the office’s felony drug unit. Stewart was relatively new to handling complex drug investigative cases, she said.

“I determined that there was not any intentional attempt to violate the defendant’s constitutional rights,” Freeman said late Monday.

Freeman said she did not issue any disciplinary action against Stewart, who remains in the felony drug unit, but did order that he receive additional training and counseling.

Prosecutors have extended an offer for Rasmussen to plead guilty to non-trafficking charges. The case is still pending.

Neither Finn nor Stewart could immediately be reached for comment.

–Michael Hewlett

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Sexual Abuse Allegations at NCSU

The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals gave new life to a lawsuit from a former N.C. State University athlete accusing a former director of sports medicine of sexual abuse.

A three-judge panel issued an unanimous ruling January 7 that overturns U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan’s 2023 dismissal of the Title IX complaint from a plaintiff referred to as John Doe 2.

The April 2023 suit was the third in nine months accusing Robert J. Murphy Jr., a licensed medical trainer and administrator at NCSU for nearly a decade, of improperly touching athletes’ genitals “under the guise of treatment.”

Among allegations included in the John Doe 2 suit and related cases:

• Head soccer coach Kelly Findley told Senior Associate Athletic Director Sherard Clinkscales in early 2016 “that Murphy was engaging in what he suspected was sexual grooming of male student-athletes.”
• The following year in August, “Murphy’s duties . . . were changed to be more ‘administrative,’” and he was “removed as the designated athletic trainer for certain men’s teams.”
• In 2018, Murphy was promoted from assistant athletic director to associate athletic director and given a raise.
• In 2022, after an athlete reported inappropriate touching, the university conducted a Title IX investigation into Murphy’s conduct and “concluded that Murphy engaged in misconduct,” the complaints stated.

John Doe 2 contended that the university “was deliberately indifferent to prior complaints of Murphy’s sexual misconduct,” according to the 4th circuit’s ruling last week.

When Flanagan dismissed his complaint, she ruled that John Doe 2 had not presented facts in his suit “that would support an inference that the university had actual notice of Murphy’s sexual harassment.” The 2016 allegations about suspected “sexual grooming of male student athletes” were not specific enough

The athlete’s appeal argued—and the 4th Circuit agreed—that Judge Flanagan had erred when she decided “that a report of ‘sexual grooming’ could not provide actual notice to the university.”

The case will now go back to district court for further proceedings on that question and whether the appropriate school official was notified.

—Anne Blythe

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