Norfolk man exonerated 2 decades after conviction on testimony from coerced witness, disgraced police detective

A Norfolk man convicted of murder following a trial that hinged on testimony from a coerced witness and a disgraced former Norfolk police detective was exonerated this month.

Gilbert Merritt III was cleared July 11 after serving more than 20 years of a 30-year prison sentence. He was convicted in 2001 of first-degree murder following a trial dependent on testimony from a witness who later recanted her statements and from Norfolk police detective Robert Glenn Ford, who was later convicted on federal charges.

The Innocence Project at the University of Virginia’s Law School, which works to exonerate wrongfully convicted Virginians, picked up Merritt’s case in 2018.

“This particular case was extraordinarily thin and relied considerably on Ford, so that was kind of an initial red flag to me,” said Juliet Hatchett, associate director of the Innocence Project Clinic at U.Va.

Merritt, 24 at the time of his conviction, maintained his innocence for more than two decades before he was granted a conditional pardon in January by then-Gov. Ralph Northam. That meant Merritt was released from prison, but the conviction remained on his record.

The exoneration wipes Merritt’s record clean.

“Exoneration is a rare thing. They don’t happen frequently,” Hatchett said. “They’re pretty extraordinary.”

An attempt to reach Merritt through his family was unsuccessful, but Hatchett said Merritt is happy to be vindicated.

“Being released from prison after 20 years quite suddenly is an overwhelming thing, but he’s doing really well,” Hatchett said.

The initial charges stemmed from a fatal shooting in June 2000 outside a Tinee Giant store in Norfolk’s West Ocean View neighborhood — the same day Merritt nearly lost his brother in a separate shooting. Police alleged that Merritt shot Vincent Burdette, 38, outside of the gas station, mistaking Burdette’s car with that of his brother’s assailant, The Virginian-Pilot reported at the time.

However, Merritt had an alibi, and no physical evidence linked him to the killing, according to the Innocence Project.

Ford was the lead detective on the case — roughly a decade before he was sentenced in 2011 to 12 1/2 years in prison for his conviction on two counts of extortion and one count of lying to the FBI.

The jury in Ford’s trial found he took thousands of dollars in bribes from people facing criminal charges in exchange for favorable treatment in their court cases. Ford told prosecutors and judges the defendants were informants who provided crucial information in homicide cases, according to testimony during the trial. But several of those individuals testified they provided no help in solving homicides.

So far, the Innocence Project has freed two other people convicted on cases for which Ford was the lead detective.

In an unrelated case involving Ford, the city of Norfolk agreed to pay out $4.9 million in 2018 to four former sailors who were wrongly convicted of a woman’s rape and murder in 1997 based on coercive police interrogations. The group of sailors, known as the “Norfolk Four,” argued in appealing their convictions that Ford forced false confessions from them. The sailors were conditionally pardoned in 2009 and fully pardoned in 2017.

In Merritt’s case, the linchpin witness falsely testified that Merritt confessed to Burdette’s murder. In 2020, she recanted her testimony in a sworn statement, saying Ford fabricated her testimony, Hatchett said.

“She was facing significant (drug) charges — decades in prison — and (Ford) told her that she could go home if she testified the way that he was telling her to,” Hatchett said.

The Innocence Project at U.Va. also interviewed Ford while working for Merritt’s exoneration. Jim Neale, a partner at law firm McGuireWoods, took Ford’s deposition, said Jennifer Givens, director of the Innocence Project Clinic.

“One of the most striking things that we learned during the course of Ford’s deposition and the discovery of this case was how lacking the investigation really was,” Givens said.

She said neither Ford nor others involved on the case “did much of anything” to corroborate statements made by the witness.

“On a broader perspective, this is important because it’s another exposure of public corruption at the hands of Detective Ford, and it’s another chapter in what has been a pretty devastating tale for the city of Norfolk,” Hatchett said.

Ali Sullivan, 757-677-1974, [email protected]