NC Appeals Court denies payments to dead Wilmington 10 members’ families

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — The North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled families of dead members of the Wilmington 10 are not eligible for payments from the state since the group’s members received a pardon of innocence.

The NC Industrial Commission had denied compensation claims from the families of Jerry Jacobs, Ann Shepard, Connie Tindall and Joe Wright. They were among the ten people charged and convicted in connection with the firebombing of a Wilmington business in February 1971 and the attack of firefighters and police officers who responded to the scene. The attack on Mike’s Grocery Store can amid a period of racial tensions following the court-ordered desegregation of public schools in Wilmington.

In 1980, the US Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of the so-called Wilmington 10 ruling the group had been denied due process through prosecutorial misconduct and several errors at trial. Then-Gov. Bev Perdue pardoned the Wilmington 10 on Dec. 31, 2012, just days before she left office. Those pardons came posthumously for Jacobs, Shepard, Tindall and Wright.

Click here to read the Court of Appeals opinion

In February 2013 the six surviving members and the estates of the four deceased filed petitions with the Industrial Commission for compensation under state law for people who have been erroneously convicted of felonies. The state paid out claims totaling $1 million to the six living members, but dismissal claims for the four estates. A deputy commissioner denied the state’s dismissal, but that was overturned on an appeal to the full commission, which determined state law was clear in its requirements about who is eligible for the compensation.

The families then appealed the decision on the sole argument that the full industrial commission was wrong to dismiss their claims. The three-judge Appeals Court panel, in its ruling released this morning, disagreed. The judges determined that the families have no legal claim against the state, because the statute gives the right to petition only to a person who was wrongfully convicted and not their descendants.