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The Norfolk Four

The Norfolk Four- False Confessions
Background
There are many cases that were discovered to have been instances of false
confessions in the past couple decades. One of the more famous cases is known as
“The Norfolk Four” because there were four men convicted who were from Norfolk,
Virginia. Their names were Derek Tice, Danial Williams, Joseph Dick Jr., and Eric
Wilson. They were convicted in 1999 of raping and murdering a woman named
Michelle Moore-Bosko in 1997 based on giving false confessions.
The false confession was surprising for most people because all of the men were active
duty Navy sailors and had given no indication of being capable of committing rape and
murder. Since the four men were residents of the neighborhood where Moore-Bosko
was raped and murdered, they were brought in for questioning. A friend of the victim
also told the police that one of the men, Williams, was obsessed with Michelle and that
gave more reason to question them all since they were friends. Detective Robert Glenn
Ford questioned them and coerced a confession out of all of them. Even though the
confessions were attained by the police, their personal statements contained conflicting
information and claims. They also couldn’t accurately describe the crime scene or
weapon, and there was no physical evidence either.
The most reliable evidence to date, DNA, did not match any of the people convicted
and the victim appeared to have been stabbed by only one individual. Analysis of the
stab wounds showed that they were all around the same area and the same depth.
This shows that the most powerful evidence in court is a confession and that any other
evidence is usually either not considered or is overruled.


Charges
Once they started losing the case, the defendants decided their best option was to
plead guilty to try and get a less severe sentence. Williams was sentenced to 8 ½ years
of prison for rape, Dick was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and Tice was
sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
These charges were based solely on the confessions from the defendants, even when
the prosecuting attorneys told the judge that the DNA evidence didn’t match.


Retrials and Appeals
Over the years since they were sentenced, all four attempted to get retrials and prove their
innocence. Tice was denied and sentenced to life in prison again, but was overturned in 2006
based on his constitutional rights to effective counsel being denied in the original trial. Tice
was finally freed in 2011 with the ruling that his confession shouldn’t have even been counted
as evidence because it didn’t meet the Daubert standard. Wilson was released in 2005, but
has to be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life. The court refused to hear his case
since he wasn’t in prison or on parole. In 2016, Williams and Dick were retried and found not
guilty of their charges because the evidence was found to not be sufficient. All four of them
were registered sex offenders after they got out of prison until they were pardoned by the
Virginia governor in 2017. They claimed there were also lasting effects from prison once they
were out and that it ruined their whole lives.


Aftermath
It was later discovered that the Norfolk police, “coerced false confessions from the men
and hid evidence that could have kept them free” (task and purpose). The exonerees
wanted compensation for their time spent in prison and demanded $68 million for being
wrongly convicted. In 1999, Omar Ballard confessed that he raped and killed the victim
by himself. There was even DNA evidence from him found at the scene, but he wasn’t
charged until a few years later since they convicted the four other men instead.


Works Cited

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