This story originally published in The Assembly.
For the second time in a year, a judge ruled a Wake County prosecutor improperly withheld potentially exonerating evidence from a defendant. He has also faced similar accusations in a third, previous case.
In the most recent case, Wake Superior Court Judge Paul Ridgeway declared a mistrial.
Ridgeway’s April 11 order stated that prosecutor Robert Stewart’s “failure to turn over the exculpatory information hindered the ability of the defense to accurately represent her client.”
The defendant in the case is Sharik Green, a 39-year-old Raleigh man who had been facing numerous drug trafficking and drug possession charges, including trafficking in heroin and fentanyl. Raleigh police officers initially arrested him in 2020 after a confidential informant allegedly bought illegal drugs from him three different times. Officers then executed a search warrant at the hotel room where he was staying.
Normally, prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys exchange information and evidence in a process called discovery. Prosecutors are legally required to turn over any evidence that could be exculpatory, or favorable, to the defense.
But Stewart didn’t turn over incriminating evidence pertaining to the confidential informant until after Green’s trial started on March 17. The confidential informant was a critical witness for the prosecution, and Ridgeway concluded that Green’s attorney could have used that evidence to impeach the informant’s credibility as a witness. Ridgeway, however, didn’t find any evidence of misconduct on Stewart’s part or that he intentionally tried to cause a mistrial.
Green had been in the Wake County jail since February 2020 awaiting trial. Now that Ridgeway has declared a mistrial, it will likely be months before prosecutors can retry the case. After the trial, Wake Superior Court Judge A. Graham Shirley granted a motion that Green’s attorney, Jackie Willingham, filed to get him released from jail. The judge released him on electronic house arrest. His trial is now scheduled to start September 15.
Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman has not taken any disciplinary action against Stewart. Stewart, who has been a prosecutor for about three years, did not return an email message or a phone call seeking comment. Freeman said in an interview that, after an internal review, she found no evidence that Stewart committed any malfeasance or that he intentionally violated anyone’s constitutional rights. Over the past several months, Freeman said she has instituted changes in how the office runs, particularly in the drug unit in which Stewart works, that will prevent further issues.
“This is information that should have been disclosed,” Freeman said. “Our duty is to review why it happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
But Willingham is bothered that it happened at all.
“Since it is still a pending case, there is not much I can say except that it is disappointing the DA’s office is aware of the issue and continues to take no action to safeguard the rights of people charged,” she said.
‘Irreparable Damage’
Ridgeway had ordered Stewart and Willingham to provide full discovery to each other 15 days before the March 17 trial–so, no later than March 2.
Stewart didn’t make the deadline, Ridgeway wrote in his order. After March 2, Stewart did provide Willingham with several documents about the confidential informant he intended to call as a witness during the trial, but it was incomplete, according to a transcript of a March 24 hearing. (Willingham was asking Judge Shirley to release Green from jail, partially because of the mistrial.)
The documents included the name of the woman who served as a confidential informant; that she had previously been charged with two counts of drug trafficking; that she had cooperated with the Raleigh Police Department on Green’s case; and that she was listed as a victim in a separate human trafficking case, Willingham said. One paragraph mentioned statements the informant made in an affidavit that police said a codefendant might have coerced her into making, and that her charges were dismissed due to her cooperation.
“That is all that was provided to me the Wednesday [March 12] before trial,” Willingham said at the hearing. “So, I had to spend the majority of Thursday and Friday trying to figure out what all of that was about. And I finally got reports from the drug trafficking and the human trafficking case, both of which included exculpatory information regarding impeachment material for their material witness from the DA’s office, from right down the hall from Mr. Stewart.”
In the course of that quick research, Willingham discovered that the codefendant had been accused of trafficking the confidential informant. Raleigh police detectives concluded that the codefendant had coerced her into making statements taking responsibility for the drugs. But Willingham didn’t find out about the jail calls until after the confidential informant took the stand and testified that she had not had any contact with the codefendant.
Willingham asked Ridgeway to order Stewart to turn over the jail calls. After listening to the jail calls, Ridgeway granted Willingham’s request. The jail calls not only proved that the confidential informant lied about not having any contact with the codefendant, but they also showed the woman actively talking about being willing to do whatever she needed to do to get the codefendant out of jail. That called into question whether her false statements to police were coerced.
Willingham said in the March 24 hearing that this was clearly exculpatory evidence that Stewart should have provided her before the trial started and not after.
The day after she received the jail calls, she asked Ridgeway to declare a mistrial, which the judge granted.
Ridgeway wrote in his order that Stewart’s late disclosure of this evidence “did not allow the defense to adequately prepare for the cross examination of a significant witness against the defendant.”
This had the potential, Ridgeway said, “to cause irreparable damage to the defendant’s case.”
Multiple Allegations
Stewart was first publicly accused of withholding evidence in the case of Alden Rasmussen in 2024 when his attorney filed a motion to dismiss. Holly Springs police officers arrested Rasmussen and a codefendant, whose name was redacted in court documents, on June 16, 2023. Those officers seized 7.1 grams of fentanyl and 9.5 grams of methamphetamine.
The two men were later indicted on drug trafficking charges, but Rasmussen said that his codefendant was only selling him drugs for personal use.
Rasmussen’s attorney, William Finn Jr., alleged in the motion that Stewart repeatedly failed to turn over evidence favorable to his client, such as the codefendant’s statements to authorities, and implied he would take away a plea deal for Rasmussen if his attorney persisted in making discovery requests.
In November 2024, Shirley sanctioned Stewart for the discovery violations, dismissing a habitual felon charge against Rasmussen. Shirley’s court order prohibited Stewart from pursuing the charge again.
In another case, criminal defense attorney Molly O’Neil filed a motion to dismiss on behalf of her client, Ossiwald Moore, in February. Raleigh police had arrested Moore on December 29, 2022, and he was later indicted for carrying a concealed gun, trafficking opioids, and other drug charges.
As in Rasmussen’s case, O’Neil alleged that Stewart failed to turn over certain evidence, including messages from cell phones and statements Moore’s codefendant made to both law enforcement and the prosecutor. (Moore previously spent more than two years in prison awaiting trial for murder in a case O’Neil said was riddled with errors; he was acquitted at that trial in 2021.)
O’Neil also said Stewart revoked a plea offer to Moore without providing the requested information.
Stewart did eventually turn over a heavily redacted copy of those statements, and after a June 2024 hearing, Superior Court Judge G. Bryan Collins ordered Stewart to provide an unredacted copy. Collins also reduced Moore’s bond from $400,000 to $20,000, which allowed him to get out of jail.
Stewart gave O’Neil a “less redacted” copy of the statements, according to the motion; the redacted portion included the codefendant saying he had bought the fentanyl seized in Moore’s arrest. The codefendant was again interviewed in July 2024, but O’Neil said she didn’t receive the officer’s report until seven months later.
A judge has not ruled on O’Neil’s motion.
Wake DA Freeman has declined to comment directly on O’Neil’s motion but said a number of factors contributed to the issues in both the Rasmussen and Green cases. One is making sure that law enforcement officers provide evidence to prosecutors in a timely manner so they can then turn it over to defense attorneys, she said. Last August, she implemented a new policy establishing more specific deadlines.
Another issue is that the drug unit has a high volume of criminal cases, Freeman said. Those cases are complex, and since the pandemic the unit has been staffed with many younger prosecutors, she said. A prosecutor with more than a decade of experience has now been assigned to the drug unit.
Freeman also said that legal assistants play a crucial role in helping collect and provide discovery to defense attorneys. For some time, legal assistants in the drug unit were also responsible for processing petitions to return firearms seized in criminal cases. Freeman said she has since reassigned that responsibility.
She believes the changes she has put in place will ensure that these issues won’t happen again.
Willingham isn’t satisfied. When she confronted Stewart, she said he didn’t seem aware of how serious his actions were.
“He showed no understanding of the significance of how my client’s right to a fair trial was affected by his misconduct, which should call into question why anyone should continue to employ him as a district attorney,” she said.
Michael Hewlett is a staff reporter at The Assembly. He was previously the legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. You can reach him at
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