A Durham County man alleges in a new federal lawsuit that police detectives used a federal inmate and other witnesses to wrongfully convict him of a 1993 fatal shooting.
Attorneys for Timothy Evans filed the lawsuit on February 20 in U.S. District Court in the Middle District of North Carolina. The lawsuit is against the city of Durham; former Durham police officers Jack Cates Jr. and Erwin Baker; and former probation officer James Edward Melvin II.
In May 2009, a jury convicted Evans of second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of Shelton Lamont Johnson on June 13, 1993 outside of a second-floor apartment. Evans served 13 years before he was released on parole in 2022. In November 2023, Superior Court Judge Edwin G. Wilson overturned Evans’ murder conviction after a key witness, Richard Waller, recanted…