On the evening of January 14, 1991, a gunman shot Phillip Seifert three times behind the counter of the Hi-Way Inn, a bar and liquor store in Wilmington, Delaware, and took about thirty dollars from the register. No fingerprint, shoe print, fiber, or weapon tied anyone to the scene, and no witness could identify a face. Police arrested eighteen-year-old Jermaine Wright nine days later on an unrelated tip and interrogated him for hours while he was high on heroin he had smuggled into the room. He confessed on videotape to a crime his own account got wrong in several places. A jury convicted him anyway in 1992, on that confession and a surprise witness: a fellow inmate who swore Wright had admitted the murder to him in jail.
The state told the jury the inmate, Gerald Samuels, had four old felony convictions, and stopped there. What it did not say was that six months earlier, Samuels had struck his own deal: testify against a co-defendant in his own drug case, and the state would recommend a lighter sentence. He was not a stranger who happened to overhear a confession. He had done this for the state before, and had reason to do it again. A jury asked to weigh a cellmate's word needs to know he has sold it before and been paid for it. Wright's jury never learned that Samuels had.
It took until 2012 for a judge to rule that the state's case did not deserve the verdict it got: along with the informant's hidden deal, police had withheld a report of a near-identical robbery less than an hour earlier, by men matching the same description. Delaware's Supreme Court spent the next four years disagreeing with itself about what that finding meant, reinstating Wright's conviction, reversing it again in 2014 over the informant evidence and ordering a new trial, then fighting two more years over whether his confession could still be used, before a new trial was set for September 2016.
On its eve, twenty-five years after his arrest, Wright pleaded no contest to second-degree murder rather than risk a jury again. Delaware law lets a defendant enter that plea while still asserting innocence, and Wright did. He was sentenced to twenty years and walked out of the courthouse that day, having already served more than twenty-four. The plea ended the case. It did not say he was innocent. For a decade afterward, the record held two things at once: that the state had built its case on a witness's hidden deal, and a homicide conviction Wright had accepted to go home.
Only in 2024 did Delaware pass a law built for that gap, letting someone who had pleaded out, rather than been acquitted, ask a court to weigh the evidence and rule on innocence. Wright's lawyers filed under it in December 2025. On July 23, 2026, Superior Court Judge Calvin Scott signed a certificate of innocence and ordered his record expunged. Wright became the 203rd person exonerated from an American death row since 1973, and Delaware's second. A court can prove in one ruling that the state's witness had a reason to lie. Getting the record to agree that the truth had changed took Delaware twelve more years, and a new law to do it.