People we’ve helped exonerate
Ricky Lee Webb
Ricky Lee Webb was released from prison on October 4, 2024, after spending nearly 47 years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, he is the fourth-longest serving exoneree in United States history.
Case history
On September 22, 1976, a 29-year-old mother of two, Charlotte Blurton, was found shot to death in her home in Gibson County, Tennessee. Her 17-month-old son was asleep beside her. Police quickly identified the killer: 17-year-old Carl Ray Webb, who lived nearby, had been arrested two weeks earlier for raping his own cousin, and was found barefoot and bloodied near the woods after the crime. The following morning, Carl led detectives to where he had hidden the murder weapon, a pistol he had stolen from a neighbor’s truck. In his first confession, Carl took full and sole responsibility for what he had done.
Two days later, he changed his story and implicated his uncle, Ricky Lee Webb.
Ricky was 21 years old, had no criminal record, and had nothing connecting him to the crime. He was taken into custody as a material witness and released within three weeks when investigators found no evidence against him. He might have stayed free, but eighteen months later, Carl accepted a plea deal for a dramatically reduced sentence in exchange for agreeing to testify against his uncle. On January 12, 1978, Ricky was arrested and charged.
At trial, the case against Ricky rested almost entirely on Carl’s testimony that had already changed multiple times, that contradicted his own original confession, and that would continue shifting in significant ways between Ricky’s first trial and his second. An all-white jury convicted Ricky in 1978. A second all-white jury convicted him again in 1982 after an appellate court ordered a new trial. He received consecutive life sentences.
Five alibi witnesses testified on his behalf. One of them, a woman driving past the victim’s house, saw Carl walking alone toward the Blurton home at the time of the murder. Ricky was elsewhere. Nobody wanted to hear it.
Image credit: TIP staff
The revelation of the 132 pages of evidence in the TBI file, as well as the evidence found in the District Attorney's file, is shocking when considered in the context of a case of this magnitude.
Judge Roy B Morgan Jr
Building the case for innocence
In 2021, Ricky Lee Webb wrote to Tennessee Innocence Project from prison and asked for help. TIP attorneys, led by Connor Webber, took on his case. What they found, once they started looking, was a prosecution built on withheld confessions, racial intimidation, and coerced testimony, a systematic suppression of evidence that had buried the truth for nearly half a century.
In November 2022, TIP requested access to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s file on the case, a file that had never been disclosed and was not subject to public records requests. When it arrived, what was inside changed everything. The file contained five separate confessions from Carl Ray Webb, all of which contradicted his trial testimony. The most significant was his very first: in it, Carl took complete responsibility for the murder and never mentioned Ricky at all. That confession existed when Ricky was tried. It was never shown to a jury.
The prosecution’s own files yielded two more confessions from Carl, as well as a drug test taken less than twelve hours after the crime that came back negative, directly undercutting Carl’s claim at trial that he had smoked marijuana with Ricky the night before the murder.
The files also documented how the state had obtained its corroborating witness. Katherine Love, the mother of Ricky’s children, had originally told investigators that Ricky was home with her when the crime occurred. That statement was buried. What prosecutors used instead was a later statement obtained after TBI agents spent thirty-five minutes alone with her, referred to her with a racial slur, and threatened to take her children away if she didn’t change her story. The tape recorder was switched off while the coercion happened. When it came back on forty minutes later, she told them what they wanted to hear. TIP interviewed Love again in 2023. She recanted again, and confirmed what had been done to her.
The files also showed how Carl had been coerced into testifying. When Carl told TBI agents that he had changed his mind and wanted to testify in Ricky’s defense, they told him that if he did, Ricky would have him killed in prison.
In November 2023, TIP filed a petition for a writ of error coram nobis. The petition detailed the withheld confessions, the contaminated witness testimony, the documented racial abuse, and the mental illness that four medical professionals, including psychiatrists at a state facility, had diagnosed regarding Carl before either trial: schizophrenia, with auditory and visual hallucinations. That evidence had also been suppressed.
Exoneration
On August 29, 2024, Senior Judge Roy B. Morgan Jr. granted TIP’s petition and vacated Ricky’s convictions on the spot. He quoted Martin Luther King Jr. from the bench: “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The judge found that Carl had confessed to acting alone, lied across both trials, and been coerced into his testimony by TBI threats. He found that the state had threatened and intimidated witnesses. He found the TBI’s use of racial slurs against Carl and Katherine Love to be “coercive by its very nature.” And he found the scale of what had been hidden to be, simply, shocking.
Ricky Lee Webb was released on bond on October 4, 2024. On October 30, 2024, all charges were dismissed. He had been in custody for 46 years, 8 months, and 23 days — taken at 21, returned at 68.
He spent those decades maintaining his innocence, filing motions, and waiting. The system that failed him so completely is the same one that, in the end, had to reckon with what it had done.
See more exonerees
Links & Resources
We are fighting every day to correct these injustices
—but we can’t do it alone.