New exculpatory evidence was found after that and the Norfolk Four were exonerated in 2017, receiving absolute pardons by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.
He confessed in March and April 1999 and insisted that he committed the rape and murder of Moore-Bosko by himself, but the prosecution continued to press the theory of a group crime.
[5] As introduced in evidence in the trials, the state's medical examiner described the stab wounds to Moore-Bosko as of a uniform depth and clustered closely together.
According to a 2007 New York Times feature article, neither his supervising Chief Petty Officer, Senior Chief Michael Ziegler, nor his supervisor, Commander Scott Rettie, were interviewed by Norfolk police or Dick's defense counsel Michael Fasanaro, Jr. As far as the Navy men knew, no records were sought from the ship, although ship logs and attendance records show clearly who is on duty at every hour.
Already aware of and concerned about what he perceived as Dick's limited mental capacity, Ziegler stressed the high security maintained on the ship.
But detective Glenn Ford and prosecutor Damian J. Hansen continued to act at the trials of Wilson and Tice in 1999 and 2000 as if the other men were still part of a large, multiple offender attack.
[9] Ballard was not investigated until February 1999, after the police received a copy of the letter he wrote from prison claiming he had killed Moore-Bosko.
[12] Despite police and prosecution pressure to implicate Williams, Dick, Tice, and Wilson, Ballard insisted until his plea bargain that he had committed the crime alone.
[10] (Listed in order of arrest for capital murder and rape from July 1997 to June 1999; ages at time of crime) Threatened by the prosecution with potential sentences of the death penalty, Williams and Dick each pleaded guilty to rape and capital murder and agreed to a stipulation of facts, Williams in January 1999.
[13][page needed] The defense counsels noted that Ballard had confessed to having committed the rape and murder by himself, and that the police had said the apartment was not broken into, but the prosecution persisted in arguing there was a group attack.
Because of widespread pre-trial publicity about the sensational case, Tice's defense counsels gained a change of venue to Alexandria, Virginia.
Judge Poston refused to allow the defense to introduce Ballard's previous confessions of March and April 1999 as the defendant had said on the stand that they were "lies."
Poston refused to let James Broccoletti, Tice's attorney, question Ballard about his February 1999 confession letter or to introduce evidence related to his other crimes against women for which he was serving time.
[6][3] After Tice's trial, on March 22, 2000, Ballard pleaded guilty to rape and murder of Moore-Bosko;[10] he said he incriminated the Norfolk Four in his associated statement in exchange for a sentence of two life terms in prison after being threatened with the death penalty by the prosecution.
Three major Washington, DC area law firms committed pro bono lawyers to provide counsel to each of the men in their appeals and other legal actions.
Tice's second conviction was overturned on November 27, 2006, by a Virginia circuit court review on constitutional grounds, of lack of adequate defense counsel.
On April 20, 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed Judge Williams' ruling to vacate Tice's convictions.
[10][6] He was required to continue to register as a sex offender with local authorities for the rest of his life and had severe restrictions limiting where he could work and live.
The court refused to hear Wilson's case, saying that since he was no longer in prison, on probation, on parole, or on supervised release, he was not in custody, and therefore could not petition for habeas.
[18] In May 2010, former detective Robert Glenn Ford of Norfolk, who had retired, was indicted in Virginia in May 2010 on unrelated federal extortion charges of accepting payments over a period of years from criminal suspects in return for favorable treatment.
[26] After Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring "conceded errors in the initial investigation and withdrew his office’s long-standing opposition to their claims of innocence", Gibney vacated the convictions of Williams and Dick, and exonerated them.
As noted, Wilson's efforts to be formally declared innocent (to clear his name and be removed from the sex offender register) were rejected by the courts because he was no longer in custody.
[26] By 2005 the Norfolk Four had attracted support from the Innocence Project, and teams of pro bono attorneys from three different firms began to work on their legal appeals and clemency petitions.
Based on its review of the evidence and confessions, it concluded that none of the Norfolk Four had been involved in the rape and murder of Moore-Bosko, and that Ballard was solely responsible as he had claimed.
[11] That year attorneys for Dick, Tice, and Williams petitioned for clemency on November 10, 2005, from Virginia governor Mark Warner, as they were each serving life sentences.
Several retired FBI agents supported the men's claims of innocence, as did eleven of the jurors who had initially publicly convicted Tice and Wilson.
[28] These jurors submitted affidavits in support of the sailors' clemency request before the Virginia State Parole Board, saying that they believed the men were innocent.
[29] Eventually some "10 former state attorneys general, more than 20 former FBI agents and 13 original jurors in two of the cases" publicly supported their innocence.
[31] As noted in the section above, the convictions of Williams and Dick were vacated by a federal court in October 2016, after evidentiary proceedings and the Virginia Attorney General's Office ended its opposition.
[27] In November 2016 the Virginia Attorney General instructed the Norfolk Police to videotape all interrogations and confessions in cases relating to homicides.