People we’ve helped exonerate
Eric Wright
Eric Wright was released from prison on October 1, 2025, after serving nearly 36 years for a crime he didn’t commit.
Image source: TIP Staff
Case history
In the early morning hours of October 15, 1989, two men robbed a Circle K convenience store on Lamar Avenue in Memphis. The clerk, Stella Oakes, was shot twice and left paralyzed from the chest down. Her boyfriend, Ricky Coleman, who was there helping her, was shot in the face. Both survived, but their lives were permanently altered by what happened that night.
One week later, Memphis police stopped Eric Wright and his younger brother on a moped several miles from the crime scene. A backpack nearby contained a pistol, but it was a .22-caliber weapon, and the crime had been committed with a .32. Neither Eric nor his brother said anything to police. Fingerprints recovered from the crime scene did not match either of them. There was no physical evidence connecting Eric to the robbery.
What there was, the only thing, was a single cross-racial eyewitness identification, made under circumstances that would later be recognized as deeply compromised. When detectives showed Stella Oakes a photo lineup four days after the shooting, they did not use Eric’s recent booking photo from the traffic stop. Instead, they used a photograph taken two and a half years earlier in which Eric was wearing a short-sleeve floral shirt, a distinctive piece of clothing that matched the description of what one of the perpetrators had been wearing. No one else in the lineup wore anything like it. Oakes identified Eric as the shooter.
In August 1990, a jury convicted Eric Wright of two counts of assault with intent to commit murder and armed robbery. He was 21 years old. He was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
Eric maintained his innocence from the day of his arrest. Over the following three and a half decades, he filed motion after motion, appeal after appeal. Everyone was denied.
Eric is a man of faith, and he did not give up that hope that one day the truth of his innocence would be heard. I am incredibly excited to see what Eric does next with his freedom.
Jessica Van Dyke Legal Director & Co-Founder
Building the case for innocence
The key that unlocked Eric Wright’s freedom had existed at the crime scene since 1989, it just hadn’t come to light yet. The fingerprints lifted from an orange juice bottle, the cash register controller, and the cooler door were never matched at the time because the database to search them didn’t exist yet. In 2021, at the urging of the Tennessee Innocence Project, Tennessee became one of the first states in the country to pass a law allowing post-conviction fingerprint testing. Eric’s case was exactly the kind of case that law was designed for.
In December 2024, TIP requested that those fingerprints be entered into the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). The results came back with a candidate: Larry Neal Jr., who was 16 years old at the time of the crime and had been arrested nearly a year later for an armed robbery at a Church’s Chicken in Memphis. Five separate latent prints on the orange juice bottle and the cash register controller were associated with Neal. There was, TIP’s motion noted, no possible innocent explanation for those prints — you could only have touched the orange juice bottle and the cash register controller at that hour if you were in that store.
Neal had no connection whatsoever to Eric Wright or his brother.
In March 2025, TIP attorneys filed a motion to reopen Wright’s post-conviction proceedings, supported by fingerprint evidence, a detailed analysis of the flawed photo lineup, and a newly uncovered police report that had never been disclosed to the defense. That report documented a witness — a clerk at a nearby bookstore who had seen two men matching the perpetrators’ descriptions shortly before the robbery — who told police he could identify one of them if shown a lineup. He was never shown one. He died in 2020.
Dr. Jeffrey Neuschatz, an expert in lineup procedures and eyewitness identification, identified a dozen distinct indicators of potential misidentification in the original lineup: the cross-racial nature of the identification, the trauma the witness had just experienced, and critically, the fact that Eric’s photo was the only one in which the subject was wearing a distinctive floral shirt matching the perpetrators’ described clothing. That photo was chosen over a more recent booking photo taken just days after the crime. The lineup had been constructed, whether intentionally or not, to point directly at Eric Wright.
Exoneration
An evidentiary hearing was held on October 1, 2025. Larry Neal took the stand and acknowledged that his fingerprints were present on the evidence. He said he had no memory of being there — his recollection of those years, he said, was cloudy due to drug use. When asked by TIP Legal Director, Jessica Van Dyke, who the shooter would have been, he named his brother, Randy Neal, who died in 2020.
Judge David Pool vacated Eric’s convictions that same day. “This evidence, had it been known prior to trial, would have changed the course of the law enforcement investigation, leading law enforcement to investigate instead the likely perpetrators of the offense — Larry and Randy Neal,” the judge ruled. The fingerprint evidence, he said, was “new scientific evidence of actual innocence that Mr. Wright did not commit this crime.”
Eric Wright walked out of prison on October 1, 2025. He had spent nearly 36 years inside — more than half his life. On November 18, 2025, the prosecution formally dismissed the case.
His exoneration is also a testament to what systemic advocacy can accomplish. The fingerprint testing law that made it possible didn’t exist when Eric was convicted. TIP helped change that.
Eric’s case is proof-positive of how we can harness new technology to get answers in older cases. We must continue to pursue policy reforms that prevent innocent people from going to prison and ensure that, if convicted, they are released.
Image source: Shannon Fontaine
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