With ‘dark pleas,’ convicts face choice between innocence, freedom

He worked in construction, was close to his family and liked to hunt and fish. Longtime friend Debbie McGowan, with whom Spruil currently lives, described him as a “good ol’ country boy.” 

Even still, Spruill admits he once had a wilder side. “On the weekends,” he said, “I did party.”

Spruill admits he used to use drugs. He says he knew Frank Swain, the murder victim who was an established drug dealer in the Roper area before his murder. He’d even bought drugs from him before. Still, he maintains he had not been there for months prior to the murder.

Since the 1990s, Spruill has denied any role in Swain’s killing. On the night of the slaying — Dec. 18, 1993 — Spruill maintains that he spent the whole night at a Christmas party at a bar in Roper with Jones and Jones’ then-girlfriend, Dana Maybin.

Spruill first got linked to the case after eyewitness testimony reported a blue truck leaving the scene of the murder. Spruill was known to drive a blue truck, and had been known to spend time with Maybin and Jones. 

The trio’s relationship was a whirlwind. Maybin and Jones had only recently arrived in Washington County, and both were using false names, fleeing minor legal issues in their home states. Spruill says he’d only known them both for three weeks, though he’d also offered Maybin a place to stay.

But Maybin, whose name became linked to the murder as authorities investigated an unrelated case, ultimately told police that she, Spruill and Jones had robbed and murdered Swain. She testified against Jones at his 1995 trial. 

Mumma argues her credibility was questionable. Her story changed often before the trial, and she wrote in a jailhouse journal ahead of Jones’ trial that she’d invented the story to scorn Jones over their failed relationship. 

Maybin recanted her story ahead of Jones’ trial — then took a plea deal and reversed course again. She was convicted as an accessory in the murder-robbery but ultimately served only 18 months on a nine-year sentence, thanks to her cooperation with prosecutors.

Spruill and Jones, meanwhile, never wavered from their story, even as prosecutors offered them both generous plea deals to testify against each other. 

“I’d have to walk the street knowing I got a man probably on death row because I had lied,” Spruill said. In the end, though, he did take a plea. After Jones was found guilty at trial, Spruill feared his case would end the same and wanted to avoid the death penalty. Both men were sentenced to life in prison.

In 2003, Spruill and Jones’ long-running innocence claims came to the attention of Mumma and the Center on Actual Innocence. 

As Mumma saw it, there were some red flags. Witness testimony, already considered unreliable, had in some cases been collected months after the murder. Mumma worried critical testimony had been made under duress. In Maybin’s jailhouse journal, for example, she expressed concerns that she would be left “holding the bag” for Swain’s killing if she didn’t stick with her story implicating Spruill and Jones.

Mumma also felt authorities had not adequately pursued alternative suspects or leads — including the possibility that Swain’s murder was linked to his work as a drug dealer. At the time, she notes, the drug trade was booming in North Carolina, leading to the violence often associated with the illicit industry.

A year after Swain’s death, Swain’s former fiancée Sonja Day was also murdered in a case that remains unsolved but apparently had a similar M.O. Both were killed in particularly violent manners, suffering multiple stab wounds and slit throats. Neither Spruill nor Jones have been considered suspects in that crime, and Jones was back home in Tennessee at the time.

“There clearly had not been any real investigation, so that was worth pursuing,” Mumma said, outlining the many problems she had with the men’s original criminal case. “There was a lot of physical evidence that never underwent any testing.” 

With the help of journalism and law students from the University of Chapel Hill, Mumma began investigating and soon found other issues — including with DNA evidence in the case. A tire iron believed to be one of the murder weapons, for instance, excluded Maybin, Spruill or Jones’ DNA, suggesting other, unidentified individuals.

In 2018, an eight-member panel of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission unanimously agreed there was enough new evidence to support a judicial review of their case. But then Maybin, who’d told the state AG’s office she would testify, disappeared. For a case full of strange twists and turns, it was just another.

Believing that they needed her at the hearing to prove she lacked credibility, Mumma and her team went to great lengths to track Maybin down. They were unsuccessful — and by all accounts, Mumma said, her whereabouts are still unknown. 

The exoneration hearing was falling apart. As Spruill and Jones’ options for proving their innocence narrowed, the state Attorney General’s office offered them an Alford plea — the one that ultimately saw Spruill and Jones released in exchange for giving up their claims of innocence. 

Unable to question Maybin, Jones and Spruill chose to take the deal rather than gambling on their freedom. The state AG’s office declined to comment for this story.

Post-conviction plea deals like this one offer potentially wrongfully convicted prisoners a chance to win back their freedom without risking a new legal process. But they also come with drawbacks, said Ohio Supreme Court Justice Michael Donnelly, who first coined the term “dark plea.” 

Once someone is charged and incarcerated, they no longer have a presumption of innocence. Options for appeal are often limited. Even in the presence of new evidence, securing post-conviction relief is difficult and can take years. 

That gives prosecutors immense leverage over vulnerable inmates, as they can use the prospect of freedom to halt efforts to uncover past injustices, Donnelly said in a Zoom interview this month. “It’s a time when the government possesses all the negotiation leverage, and the prisoner has virtually none.” 

Donnelly has advocated for reform of the post-conviction hearing process — including calling for a ban on such plea deals, at least until after convicts have a chance for a new trial. 

Donnelly believes that prosecutors should support efforts to uncover the truth when new evidence surfaces. And yet data suggests post-conviction plea bargaining serves the opposite purpose, allowing prosecutors to uphold past convictions even when they know their case may lose at trial, according to a 2022 research paper from University of Wisconsin Law School.

The researchers found that prosecutors offered plea deals that would uphold past convictions even when evidence suggested the original defendant was actually innocent. When defendants turned down the deals and fought for their innocence instead, they won a dismissal of charges or the right to a new trial in 80% of the 250 completed cases reviewed.

Some defense attorneys do support such deals, Donnelly said — though not exactly for the right reasons.

 Instead, they fear that were it not for such deals,“innocent people would die in prison,” Donnelly said. While obviously not as good as a full exoneration, some attorneys would rather see their clients released through post-conviction deals than continue to spend their lives behind bars.

The aftermath

These days, Spruill is living in Plymouth, North Carolina, with his longtime friend Debbie McGowan.

Besides her, he mostly avoids people. He fears that someone might get him in trouble, or that he might get seen with the wrong person at the wrong time. 

He survives on Social Security. He does work around the house for McGowan to pay for room and board, and he occasionally takes odd jobs for extra money. 

Despite the challenges, Spruill doesn’t regret his plea.“I’m out and I’m good,” he said. He’s gone back to hunting and fishing like when he was younger — only now he hunts with a gun powder musket and a bow and arrow. It’s the most the state will allow him, a convicted murderer, to possess.

It’s a better fate, Spruill acknowledges, than the one faced by his former co-defendant Jones.

By the time they were released in 2021, Jones knew nobody in North Carolina. Much of his family in Tennessee had died. 

Jones needed Mumma to pick him up from prison. On his first night of freedom, Jones slept on top of the covers of Mumma’s guest bed, unsure if he was allowed to untuck them. 

“You had to walk him through every step,” Mumma recalled. He stayed with her family for several months. 

While Spruill was 35 when he was convicted, Jones was only 22. He spent his young adult life in prison — and compared to Spruill, he had a harder time letting go of the case. Mumma says he often peppered her with questions about the case. He wanted them to keep looking for Maybin, in hopes that finding her might finally clear his name. 

In a December 2021 interview with a local television station, Jones expressed frustration about his circumstances. Even though he was out of prison, he did not feel like his name had been fully cleared.

“Everybody needs justice, and that’s not a big thing to ask for,” he said. “Run the DNA through the database and go get the people who did this. Not just for me, but for everyone involved.”

With Spruill settled back into life in Plymouth, Jones was struggling. Severe back pain led to surgery, which led to painkillers, which led to harder drugs, Mumma said. 

“He wasn’t just trying to kill the pain in his back,” Mumma said. Instead, as she sees it, Jones was struggling with more than just physical pain. 

Jones ultimately returned to his home state of Tennessee, moving in with his longtime family friend Debbie Hammett.

In an interview, Hammett, who said she never believed the murder accusations, described Jones as gentle and kind-hearted. 

Hammett said Jones didn’t express any regrets about his plea deal. Like Spurill, she said, he just seemed happy to be free.

Still, like Mumma, she thinks Jones was struggling with the transition back into free society. He seemed nervous and jittery and often tensed up around police officers. 

Jones found painting and carpentry work out of prison, but his back pain was a constant source of frustration. Hammett also suspected he was struggling with substance abuse. 

Then, tragedy struck. On Dec. 26, 2022 — a little more than a year after Jones' release — his car veered off the road near Trenton, Tennessee.

The car went airborne and struck a tree, according to a Trenton Police report. Jones died at the scene, though a police report on the incident doesn’t list an explicit cause.

The report notes that officers didn’t suspect alcohol or drugs but provides no further explanation of how officers reached that conclusion. Mumma said that a toxicology report wasn’t possible due to the severity of the crash. The report lists “cellular in use in vehicle” as a possible distraction. Trenton Police said there was no further information available.

Both Mumma and Hammett believe that Jones’ post-release struggles contributed to his death. Hammett doesn’t rule out the possibility that he’d taken something before driving. 

Mumma, who has visited the crash site herself. Based on the way he suddenly veered off the road, she is convinced that Jones decided to end his life.

The wrongful conviction, she thinks, was just too much for Jones to bear. Unable to clear his name after the Alford plea, “he was living the lie of being innocent,” Mumma said. But Jones didn’t want his long-held claims innocence to be a lie in the eyes of the law: “He wanted that to be the truth.”

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