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 159th 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 27th 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.