Free, Not Cleared: The Detroit Police File That Kept Roger Carlos Ray in Prison for 33 Years

Roger Carlos Ray went to prison in 1993 for a 1987 Detroit murder. The Detroit Police Department had a file that pointed at the man who testified against him. Ray’s lawyers never saw it. Thirty-three years later, he is home. On paper, he is still a man whose murder charges could come back.

The File Was Always There

Let me tell you what I notice first when I look at this case. Nobody had to discover anything. The evidence did not wash up decades later in a new lab or a deathbed confession. It was sitting in a Detroit police folder the whole time, written down by the detectives who worked the case, in their own handwriting, in 1987. It just never made it to the people defending Ray.

John Holmes was killed on Easter Sunday, April 19, 1987. He was the assistant manager of an apartment building on Grand River, and according to the Michigan Court of Appeals, he lent money to people at high interest. He was beaten and shot. His charred body was found in the building’s boiler room. His safe was gone.

Edmond Wright lived in the building. Two days after the murder, on April 21, he gave police a statement that did not mention Ray at all. On April 27, he gave a second one, now saying he saw Ray covered in blood. On May 1, he gave a third, adding that Ray told him he shot Holmes twice in the head. At trial, Wright testified that Ray, armed and bloody, made him help clean up and haul things to a dumpster. Voice of Detroit reports that only the second and third statements were read to the jury.

Then nothing happened for almost six years. Ray was not arrested until 1993, when he was 28. A Recorder’s Court jury before Judge Craig Strong convicted him on November 12, 1993, of felony murder and felony firearm. The sentence was life without parole.

What Detroit Police Wrote Down and Kept

In 2018, private investigator and former TV reporter Scott Lewis used Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act to get the Detroit Police Homicide Section file on Holmes’s death, number 87-203. Tucked inside was a separate set of papers labeled a miscellaneous file. Ray went through it and swore in an affidavit that none of it had been in his trial materials.

The Court of Appeals described what was in it. A redacted photocopy of Edmond Wright’s identification card, with a police note saying it was found wedged between the seat cushions of the sofa in Holmes’s living room. A handwritten note about contacting a “Mr. Mitchel” and having him call Homicide. And notes that Wright called in sick at work on April 20, 1987, the day after the murder, never came back, and was to be arrested if he showed up for his paycheck. Voice of Detroit, which reviewed the file, also reports progress notes naming Wright as the suspect and records showing he and his girlfriend twice missed scheduled polygraph exams.

Read that list again with the trial in mind. The man who put Ray in prison was the man the detectives were looking at. His ID was in the dead man’s couch. He vanished from his job the next morning. The police were prepared to arrest him at the pay window. Ray’s jury heard Wright tell a story about Ray. It never heard that the people who wrote down that story had Wright in their sights first.

The note about “Mr. Mitchel” turned out to matter most. Lewis found Jason Mitchell, who signed an affidavit in April 2018. Mitchell said he read about the murder in the paper in 1987 and was then invited to Wright’s apartment, where Wright told him Holmes kept money in a safe and, in Mitchell’s account as recorded by the Court of Appeals, that “he had to get rid of Holmes to get the money.” Mitchell said Wright showed him a stack of cash and two .357 Magnum pistols and asked him to get rid of the guns. He did not. He called Detroit police, got put on hold, hung up, and never heard back. He did not know Ray.

Somebody at Homicide wrote down Mitchell’s name. Nobody followed up for 31 years, until a private investigator did it for them.

Thirty-One Years of Courts Looking at the Wrong Papers

Ray did not sit quietly. MLive reports that he could not afford a lawyer for most of his time inside, so he taught himself legal research in prison law libraries. His direct appeal was denied. His first two motions for relief were denied. None of those courts had the miscellaneous file, because nobody outside the police department knew it was there.

When Ray finally brought it to court, the first response was a technicality. Michigan Court Rule 6.502(G) generally allows one motion for relief from judgment, and a second or third only for evidence that was not discovered before the first. The trial court said the file was “newly available,” not newly discovered. The Court of Appeals vacated that ruling in July 2020 and sent it back.

On remand, the trial court denied Ray again. It agreed that the evidence was new and that the prosecution conceded it could not have been found earlier. But it called the ID card, the missed-work notes, and Wright’s suspect status cumulative, because the jury already knew the defense blamed Wright. It said Mitchell’s account would at most make Wright an accomplice. And on Brady, it found nothing exculpatory, because the material at most implicated Wright, and the jury had already heard that theory.

Sit with that reasoning for a second. The defense told the jury Wright did it. The police had written evidence that they thought so too. And the court’s answer was that the jury had already heard the accusation, so the proof did not add much.

The Court of Appeals Did Not Buy It

The appeal went to a panel of Judges Christopher Murray, Stephen Borrello, and Kathleen Mariani. Ray was represented by attorney Tiffany Howell. At oral argument on August 7, 2024, Borrello did not hide his reaction. As quoted by Voice of Detroit, he told the prosecution, “The police have no right whatsoever to do what they did in this case, and that fact alone for me is sufficient to let this guy out of prison.”

The panel’s unpublished opinion, issued October 3, 2024, reversed the trial court on the parts that mattered. The notes on Wright as a suspect, his missing work, the polygraphs, and the Mitchell lead were new facts the jury never heard, not repeats. And the trial court had read Mitchell’s affidavit too narrowly. The panel said a reasonable reading of it could support the conclusion that Wright committed the murder, not just that he helped clean up after it. Because Wright’s testimony was the center of the case against Ray, testimony like Mitchell’s could create reasonable doubt.

The panel vacated the denial, ordered an evidentiary hearing where Mitchell would testify, told the trial court to treat the case as a priority, and kept jurisdiction so the case could not wander off into a new appeal. It did not decide the Brady claim. It told the trial court to take up Brady materiality if necessary after the hearing.

Judge Paul John Cusick held that hearing. Lewis and Mitchell testified. On May 11, 2026, Cusick vacated the conviction and granted a new trial, finding, as MLive reported it, that the evidence undermined confidence in the verdict and made a different result probable. Voice of Detroit describes the ruling as unusually thorough for a Wayne County post-conviction decision, with Cusick working through the facts and the law himself rather than leaning on the court rules that so often end innocence claims before they start.

Free, Not Cleared

Here is the part of this story that should not get lost in the happy photos.

Ray did not walk out in May. He stayed in prison for five more months while the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office decided whether to try him again. According to Voice of Detroit, the office initially planned to retry him on the same first-degree murder charge. That plan depended on Edmond Wright, the same witness the police file treated as a suspect. At the October 13 hearing, an assistant prosecutor told Judge Aoun that prosecutors and police had spent months trying to locate Wright and could not. Both sides agreed to dismiss. Prosecutor’s office spokesperson Maria Miller told MLive that a decision was made not to retry the case.

The dismissal was without prejudice. In Michigan there is no statute of limitations on murder. Legally, the State can bring these charges again. MLive put it plainly: this is not an acquittal. No judge has said Ray is innocent. No prosecutor has said it either.

Voice of Detroit notes that dismissal without prejudice is how most Wayne County wrongful-conviction cases end, including cases later listed by the National Registry of Exonerations. That is true, and it is also the problem. A man spent 33 years in prison on the word of a witness the police suspected, the evidence of that was hidden from him, and the system’s final word on it is a procedural shrug that leaves the door open.

The Brady Question Nobody Had to Answer

Under Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors must give the defense evidence that is favorable and material, including evidence that impeaches their witnesses. Since Kyles v. Whitley in 1995, that duty has covered what police know, too. Prosecutors cannot hide behind the fact that the detectives kept it in a different drawer.

No court has issued a final ruling that Ray’s Brady rights were violated. The 2021 trial court said they were not. The Court of Appeals left it for later. Cusick’s new trial order came on the newly discovered evidence standard, and the dismissal ended the case before anyone had to go further. That means the most important legal question in this case, whether the State unconstitutionally hid evidence that would have helped Ray, was never formally decided.

The facts underneath it are not in dispute. Miller confirmed to MLive that Detroit police kept the miscellaneous file and that it was not turned over during Ray’s prosecution. Ray’s attorney Peter Dee told Voice of Detroit that the conviction rested on a prosecution in which exculpatory evidence was purposefully withheld from Ray and the jury. Howell told MLive that the withheld material kept the original defense from effectively challenging the case against him, and that the real killer was never brought to justice.

Ray’s case is also not the first time Detroit’s miscellaneous files have come up. Voice of Detroit has reported that in 1996, attorney Sarah Hunter used the same kind of file to free Dwight Love, after a judge ordered the files released and they turned up evidence that had been kept from his defense. Thirty years later, the same kind of folder took a private investigator and a FOIA request to pry loose. Ray’s attorneys say a federal civil rights suit is coming, and that is where the question of who kept this file, and why, will finally have to be answered under oath.

What Thirty-Three Years Cost

Ray’s parents, his grandparents, and his younger sister all died while he was in prison, MLive reports. His children were about a year old when he went in. They are in their mid-30s now. One of his daughters became a nurse, and he was not there to see it. Supporters at the October 13 hearing included family members Gloria Ray and Arthur Ray III and Lavone Hill, a Detroit man exonerated in 2024 who had campaigned for Ray’s release for years.

The things he wanted first were small. A bath. A prayer. He spent his first night out at a hotel and slept on the floor with the pillows, because the bed felt too soft after three decades. He told MLive he is stunned by cars that start on their own and GPS that talks back. He wants to work with young people and push for mental health awareness. And he told the reporter, “I’m not a bitter man. I’m a better man.”

His attorneys plan to seek compensation under Michigan’s Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act, which pays $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment. That law does not just ask whether a conviction was thrown out. It requires clear and convincing proof that new evidence shows the claimant did not commit the crime and was not an accomplice. Ray will have to prove in the Court of Claims what no criminal court ever said out loud.

Why This Case Matters

I want to be direct about what the lesson is here, because it is not “the system worked.” The system had the answer in 1987. It wrote the answer down. Then it filed it where the defense would never look and spent the next 33 years defending a verdict built without it.

What got Ray out was not a police audit, an internal review, or a prosecutor reopening a file on their own. It was a private investigator with a FOIA request, a man who taught himself law in a prison library, a Court of Appeals judge willing to say out loud that the police had no right to do this, and a trial judge who did the work. Every one of those is a person who chose to keep going when the institution in front of them had already said no.

If you have a loved one with a Detroit conviction from that era, ask for the whole homicide file, not just the case file. Ask for the miscellaneous file by name. Michigan’s FOIA belongs to you, and in this case it did what thirty years of appeals could not.

Roger Carlos Ray is home. He should also be cleared. Clutch Justice will follow the compensation claim and the civil rights case, and whether anyone at the Detroit Police Department or the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office is ever asked, under oath, why the file stayed in the drawer.