Starting in 2006, Central Ohio native Richard Horton served more than a dozen years in prison for a crime he didn't commit.
He was initially sentenced to 23 years in prison, but he worked with lawyers at The Ohio Innocence Project (OIP)—a nonprofit dedicated to helping wrongfully convicted and imprisoned individuals in Ohio—and was exonerated in 2023.
WYSO Community Voices Producer Mary Evans interviewed Horton and asked him what advice he would give to people in a similar situation to the one that he was in. Excerpts from that conversation are below.
The following transcript is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mary Evans: You were wrongfully convicted out of Franklin County, and you said that you exhausted all your state resources. What does that mean?
Richard Horton: It basically means that I filed every appeal that each individual is entitled to after incarceration. You get the federal, state, and local appeals, so you get three different appeals. And it's a long process. It took me about 12 years to exhaust all my remedies.
Evans: And so you linked up with the Ohio Innocence Project. And so, tell me a little bit about what the exoneration process was like for you. Because I think people think that once someone says, 'Okay, we got it wrong, let them out,' that that's the end of it. So, what was the process like for you to be fully exonerated?
Horton: To get the Ohio Innocence Project to take your case is...it's a big deal. It's an awesome deal because they get approached with thousands of cases probably on a monthly basis. I was wrongly incarcerated for a robbery/home invasion. So, to get them to take interest in my case was a huge blessing.
They agreed to start looking at my case in 2015, and I went through maybe about eight different students before I started to get any kind of rhythm and action. So what they did in my case was they were able to extract DNA from the crime scene, from a shell casing, even though the crime was at this time it was probably about 15 years, maybe 14 years old. The evidence from the crime scene was that old, so that was another huge blessing in my favor.
I didn't really understand my rights and how they were violated.Richard Horton
So once I was able to obtain a DNA match that excluded me, that's kind of when the exoneration process began, and a judge granted me a new trial. I was given...the state of Ohio had to release me. And contrary to what people may believe, it didn't really go smoothly because once the judge overturned my conviction, the state refiled the charges again. So, I had to essentially pay a bond to get out of prison, even though my conviction was overturned. So basically, what happened when it was time for me to go to trial again? The state just conceded. And so the exoneration started to speed up more fast, more quickly.
Evans: If you had one piece of advice to give someone who might be going through the same thing that you're going through, they feel like giving up, or they just lost hope. Like, what would you tell them to do?
Horton: I would...the advice that I would give them is to learn the law. I really didn't really understand the rights that I had as a citizen in the United States. And so I didn't really understand my rights and how they were violated. But you've got to stay focused, man, because it can happen. If it can happen to me, it can definitely happen to you.
Support for ReEntry Stories comes from The Montgomery County Office of Reentry and the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO.
