Darryl Howard hugs his wife, Nannie, after being released from the Durham County Detention Facility on Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016. (Kaitlin McKeown/The Herald-Sun via AP)

Last week, a federal Court of Appeals panel mostly ruled in favor of Darryl Howard, a Black man who spent 24 years behind bars for two murders he didn’t commit.

But the decision won’t help Howard collect the millions of dollars a jury awarded him in 2021. If anything, it demonstrated that for those railroaded by the criminal legal system, happy endings are hard to come by.   […]

Jeffrey Billman is a politics and law reporter for The Assembly. The former editor-in-chief of INDY in Durham, he holds a master's degree in public policy analysis from the University of Central Florida.

Michael Hewlett is a courts and law reporter for The Assembly. He was previously a legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal and has won two Henry Lee Weathers Freedom of Information Awards.