Florida Supreme Court Orders Exoneration of Ralph Daniel Wright, Jr.

The Florida Supreme Court has direct­ed that Ralph Daniel Wright, Jr. (pic­tured) be acquit­ted of the mur­der charges for which he was sen­tenced to death in 2014, mak­ing him the 159^th per­son exon­er­at­ed from death row in the United States since 1973. 

On May 11, 2017, the court unan­i­mous­ly vacat­ed Wright’s con­vic­tions for the mur­ders of his ex-girl­friend and their son, rul­ing that the ​“pure­ly cir­cum­stan­tial” evi­dence against him was insuf­fi­cient to con­vict. A major­i­ty of the court joined a con­cur­ring opin­ion by Justice Charles Canady hold­ing that ​“no ratio­nal tri­er of fact could have found … beyond a rea­son­able doubt” that Wright was the killer. 

Prosecutors accused Wright of mur­der­ing Paula O’Conner — a white woman with whom he had an affair — and their 15-month-old son Alijah sup­pos­ed­ly to ​“avoid a child sup­port oblig­a­tion and … main­tain a ​‘bach­e­lor lifestyle.’ ” The court not­ed that ​“none of the evi­dence pre­sent­ed at tri­al direct­ly tied Wright to the mur­ders” and that the vic­tim’s young-adult daugh­ter, who had a volatile rela­tion­ship with the vic­tim, also had a finan­cial motive, hav­ing received more than $500,000 in life insur­ance ben­e­fits as a result of her moth­er’s and half-brother’s deaths. 

Much of the state’s case relied on the pres­ence of a black mil­i­tary glove in the home of the mur­der vic­tims. While Wright, a mem­ber of the Air Force, had access to that type of glove, ​“the State could not prove that Wright ever wore the glove, that he left it on Paula’s couch, that it came from MacDill [the base where Wright was sta­tioned], or that it was even used in the murders.” 

DNA tests by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement report­ed the results as incon­clu­sive, but inde­pen­dent analy­sis by the DNA Diagnostic Center and Bode, the pri­vate labs hired by the defense and pros­e­cu­tion, respec­tive­ly, exclud­ed Wright as a con­trib­u­tor of the DNA found on the glove. The DNA analy­sis did not test for the pres­ence of the vic­tim’s daugh­ter, whom police did not investigate. 

Wright was con­vict­ed of the mur­ders, and the tri­al court sen­tenced him to death after a bare 7 – 5 major­i­ty of the jury vot­ed to rec­om­mend the death penal­ty. The Florida Supreme Court lat­er declared death sen­tences based upon non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tions to be unconstitutional. 

Wright is the 27^th per­son to be exon­er­at­ed from death row in Florida. Nineteen of the 21 exon­er­a­tion cas­es from Florida in which the jury vote is known have involved a non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tion of a death sen­tence or a judi­cial over­ride of a jury rec­om­men­da­tion of life.