'OBJECTION': S.C. man 'railroaded' in conviction fought AG's office for years for new trial ...Middle East

CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) - It took no time for a Chesterfield County jury to convict Oscar Fortune of murder. After a week-long trial in March 2006, the 32-year-old Marlboro County man was hauled off to a state prison to start work on his 37-year sentence.

Fortune would have been 69 years old if he ever walked out of prison again.

It was no secret that Fortune shot and killed Anthony Shields in the parking lot of the Cheraw, S.C., Huddle House on Dec. 23, 2001. That wasn't even a contested fact at trial.

Fortune admitted he fired five shots into Shields that night, but that he did so to save his and his cousin's lives.

Fortune was at home sleeping that night. His trial produced no evidence showing he was anywhere near Cheraw and had no intention of being anywhere near the Huddle House that night. That changed when his cousin, Sonta McCall, called asking for help.

“She told me she had been in an incident at the Green Villa, in which Anthony Shields hit her in the face with a bottle," Fortune told Queen City News Chief Investigative Reporter Jody Barr during an interview in October 2022.

"So, I asked her where she was at, she told me the Huddle House," Fortune said.

"She said she wanted to go to the police department to take out a warrant on Anthony Shields...so, she didn't feel comfortable going there alone, and she wanted me to assist her to go there. So, being a big brother, if you want to say. Being the big brother to her, I'm going and she's my family. I love her. I'm going to assist her, and that's how I ended up at the Huddle House.”

Fortune testified at trial that there were between 80 to 100 people at the Huddle House that night. The parking lot was packed with cars and people, Fortune said he didn't know.

Fortune met his cousin, and the pair saw what turned out to be Shields pull up and park in a dirt parking lot near the highway at the front of the restaurant's property. Trial testimony shows McCall walked over to Shields' car and the pair started arguing.

Fortune, concerned for his own safety, grabbed a .38 caliber revolver from the console, slipped it into his pocket, and walked to join his cousin at Shields' window.

"I'm not going to sit here and say that I wasn't expecting to fight him because I'm from the south, and the way we grow up, if a man puts his hand on your sister, then you and that man have to, you know, see each other. So that's what I was planning to do. We were going to discuss what happened and go from there," Fortune told QCN.

When Fortune confronted Shields about hitting his cousin, “He just looked at me and the next thing I know, I see a flash and hear a bang," Fortune recalled. "He had already had that gun in his hand.”

Fortune testified he closed his eyes when Shields fired the gun, and when he opened them, his cousin was on the ground.

"Sonta was on the ground, so I'm not feeling any pain, and I'm still standing. So at that time, I fired back up on him because I felt like he had just shot Sonta, because I realized I wasn’t shot, but at that time, I knew he had a weapon. I know he fired the weapon. And I know I have a right to protect myself as well as protect her. So I fired back," Fortune said.

Shields died at the scene. Oscar Fortune got back into his car and took off.

THE SURRENDER

“It's survival mode now. I've never been to that point in my life," Fortune explained. "Not knowing how I'm going to react, but your natural reflexes take over. It's really kill or be killed at that point because this man has a weapon. This man has fired a weapon. This man has been violent earlier in that night; hitting her in the face with a bottle. So that's where I'm at.”

With so many people who heard the shots and saw what happened, Fortune said he jumped into his car and left.

"I wasn't running. I left because I wanted to get out of that situation, and I left because I needed to gather my thoughts and digest what just happened," Fortune said.

"It's not like this is an everyday event…it’s not like I'm used to what just took place. This is the first time in my life that something like this has taken place. So, of course, I need to gather my thoughts. I need to understand what just took place, you know, and everything.”

The next day, Fortune turned himself in to the Cheraw Police Department. Fortune also learned shortly after the shooting that the man he killed had a close connection to the same police department he was surrendering himself to.

Shields' brother, Damien, worked for the department. It was Damien Shields' first night on the job and he had no idea the shooting call involved his brother when the 911 dispatcher assigned units to respond.

Fortune showed up to the PD armed. Armed with the same .38 caliber gun he fired in the Huddle House parking lot the night before. All five shell casings were still in the chamber, he said.

He believed investigators would listen to his side of the story and find evidence to support his story of shooting Shields in self-defense.

"I'm naive. I don't have a criminal record. I've never dealt with the justice system before, so actually I felt that I could go in there, tell them what happened, because you got to have his gun. So let me go and tell my side of the story so it can match up with what you all have found during your investigation," Fortune said.

When Fortune did leave, he was wearing handcuffs and headed to the Chesterfield County jail with a murder charge.

There was one major problem with his self-defense story: when investigators got to the scene, there wasn't any trace of Shields' gun. Even the next day, when Fortune surrendered and told his story of Shields firing at him, there was no evidence of any other gun at the scene.

Other than the .38 caliber revolver and those five pieces of lead fired from it.

Days after Fortune's arrest, investigators finally found a major piece of evidence supporting Oscar Fortune's self-defense story. Investigators learned someone stole Shields' .25 caliber pistol from the scene between the time of the shooting and when the first deputy arrived on scene 30 minutes later.

Investigators later found a .25 caliber shell casing in the back floorboard of Shields' car.

But, even with that evidence, the Fourth Circuit Solicitor's Office indicted Fortune on a murder charge. He was later set free on bond and waited four years for Jay Hodge's solicitor's office to give him his day in court.

And that's where this story takes a significant - legally significant - turn.

JUDGE REFUSES NEW TRIAL

Fourth Circuit Assistant Solicitor JR Joyner and Oscar Fortune faced off in a three-day trial on March 6, 2006, inside the Chesterfield County Courthouse. Joyner was headed toward his third year practicing law and was assigned to lead the prosecution.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, thank you so much for your time throughout the course of this trial. I want to start by telling you that we both have jobs here," Joyner told the jury in his closing argument.

"My job is to present the truth. In fact, if you look in the South Carolina Code of Laws, which mandates what a solicitor's job is, we can't be like a normal attorney. A normal lawyer has to advocate on behalf of his client. But on the other hand, the Solicitor can't. We have to say what the truth is, and it's –"

Fortune's attorney, Ed Saleeby, objected: "The jury are the finders of the truth." Judge John Milling attempted to correct Joyner's opening salvo, "The jury is the finders of the truth. I think what he was referring to was there is also an obligation on the Solicitor's Office beyond simply that of presentation, but the jury does have the burden of deciding what is the truth in this matter."

Joyner continued his closing.

READ: THE STATEMENTS BY FRANKLIN "JR" JOYNER TO THE CHESTERFIELD COUNTY JURY THAT LED TO OSCAR FORTUNE'S RELEASE FROM PRISON:

"And what that means is that we have something in law that [is] called nolle prosse, and to nolle prosse a person that has been indicted for a crime or charged with a crime. After further investigation, somebody else did the crime where you can dismiss it and nolle prosse is the notification in which we dismiss the case. And if I know the person has done something that I think the facts show they're guilty of, then I can't nolle prosse it. I have to go forward with it. And as I said my job is to show the truth. On the other hand, the defense attorneys' jobs are to manipulate the truth. Their job is to shroud the truth. Their job is to confuse jurors. Their job is to do whatever they have to -- without regard for the truth -- to get a not guilty verdict," Joyner told the 12 Chesterfield County jurors.

On March 9, 2006, the jury deliberated and returned a unanimous decision. The jurors voted 12-0 to convict Fortune of murdering Anthony Shields. Judge Milling sentenced Fortune to 37 years in prison.

Fortune's release date was set for 2043.

Instead of giving up, Fortune fought. He hit the prison's law library and started years of legal research on state and federal self-defense cases. He was looking for any loose thread he could find to rip apart his conviction to get another shot at proving his self-defense claim.

Although his case file and prison record showed it, Oscar Fortune still didn't believe he was a murderer.

Fortune did what most convicts do: he filed an appeal with the S.C. Court of Appeals on May 1, 2009. He claimed only 64 of the 162 jurors summoned for jury duty showed up. Only 41 were available to serve, according to Fortune's appeal.

He was denied a right to a representative jury, he argued, "...because the jurors available were disproportionately friends of the decedent’s family, or had been exposed to media coverage about the case, or had other potential biases."

The following month, the appeals court denied Fortune's appeal.

He stepped back and punted. Fortune started taking the advice of those "jailhouse lawyers" that real lawyers and prosecutors laugh about in the hallways of the courthouse.

READ: OSCAR FORTUNE'S FIRST ALLEGATION OF PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT AGAINST THE MAN WHO PROSECUTED HIM:

“It's like this, Jody, when you get convicted, a clock starts ticking…and there's no way for you to even know this. No one even tells you this. A clock starts ticking. So, you have your direct appeal that you go through, then you have your PCR (Post Conviction Relief) that you go through, and then you can go federal habeas (corpus). So, when I first started studying, I was just reading cases, reading cases, reading cases and cases on self-defense and this is through people helping me, these guys, I'll never forget these guys," Fortune said.

"They taught me to stop reading about self-defense. Start studying procedure, start studying the rules of court, and then, after you have all this…they taught me: study procedure. They taught me about the clock ticking," Fortune told QCN, "First, learn about the Constitution, learn about your rights, learn about procedure, learn about exactly what happened for them to bring you to where you're at.”

In August 2009, Fortune filed his Post Conviction Relief application with the S.C. Attorney General's Office, asking for a new trial. Fortune accused his own defense attorney of failing to move for a mistrial on Joyner's closing argument. That was the Constitutional rights violation Fortune hinged his hopes for a new trial.

Judge Paul Burch was assigned to hear and rule on Fortune's PCR application.

On Jan. 11, 2012, Burch held a hearing on Fortune's PCR. Fortune said the AG's office had two assistant AGs across from him fighting against his claims, which included the allegations of prosecutorial misconduct claims against his trial prosecutor, JR Joyner.

Burch denied Fortune's PCR application on Feb. 22, 2012, finding Joyner's remarks were "improper," but not enough to have violated Fortune's right to a fair trial. Fortune would later file a Rule 59 motion, which is a request for a judge to reconsider a previous ruling under the state's Rules of Civil Procedure.

On June 21, 2012, Judge Burch denied that motion, as well.

It would take the S.C. Court of Appeals nearly four years to undo Judge Burch's order denying Fortune PCR relief. The appeals court ordered Burch to hold another hearing to determine whether Fortune was denied a fair trial based on the solicitor's comments.

Burch, again, denied Fortune a new trial. In one last attempt to force Burch to produce another record of his findings regarding Joyner's comments to the jury, Fortune filed another Rule 59 motion with Burch, asking him to reconsider his ruling that Joyner's comments didn't hurt him at trial.

Burch again denied Fortune PCR relief.

PROSECUTOR'S COMMENTS: 'ABSOLUTELY INEXCUSABLE'

Oscar Fortune was now in his 12th year in the penitentiary. He spent the previous eight years fighting with PCR Judge Paul Burch over a prosecutor's comments Fortune believed were a prima facie case of prosecutorial misconduct.

Burch, on multiple occasions, reviewed Joyner's jury closing argument and found that what he told the jury didn't warrant Oscar Fortune getting a new trial.

And Burch wasn't budging on that.

Fortune believed he'd angered Burch through his back-and-forth, trying to get Burch to reconsider his rulings on Joyner's jury comments and to recognize that Fortune's right to a fair trial was violated. The remand from the appeals court pushed Burch even further, with the appellate judges vacating Burch's denial of Fortune's Rule 59 motion and ordering Burch to take up the issues Fortune laid out in his PCR claim against Joyner and his own defense attorney's "ineffective assistance" during trial and to issue a formal ruling on specific issues.

Burch held a second, and final, in-person PCR hearing for Fortune on August 2, 2016, to address the appeals court's order for Burch to issue findings of fact and conclusions of law on the issues Fortune raised.

That also meant more work for Burch to finish the Fortune PCR case, including issuing a written, formal order explaining each element of his ruling.

Just before the hearing ended, Fortune's PCR attorney, Joel Stroud, and Judge Burch were in a back-and-forth over what the court and Fortune's counsel expected to happen after the hearing ended. Burch asked the AG's office and Stroud to submit briefs, if needed.

The complete record, including briefs, was already filed in Fortune's appeal long ago.

"We're going to have to go back through this and piece it together, so any help y'all can give us as far as a brief, try to get them in as soon as possible," the hearing transcript shows Burch explaining to Stroud.

READ: COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT OF OSCAR FORTUNE'S AUGUST 2016 PCR HEARING BEFORE JUDGE PAUL BURCH:

Stround reminded Burch that the appeals court remanded the PCR application "for a decision, and there's nothing we need to provide to you." Burch reiterated that "if there is something that you overlooked or you want me to look at, give it to me."

"Well, the only thing we would like for you to look at is the existing materials. No new briefs," Stroud explained. "And I don't want the State to provide any new briefs," Stroud told Burch.

The transcript shows Stroud crossed a line with the judge.

"No, sir. You're not going to sit here and tell me what I can ask for now, sir. Do you understand what I'm saying? I said if you would like to send briefs, you can do it. You're not going to sit here and dictate to me what I'm going to do," Burch told Stroud. "Sir, I didn't know I was dictating. I was just --" Burch interjected and cut Stroud off.

"No, sir. You sat right there and you told me what I was going to do. Now, if you want to send a brief to try to condense all this for me to try to come up with an order, that's fine. If you don't want to do it, then sit there and be quiet. But don't you come in my court and tell me what I'm going to do," Burch told Stroud. "I apologize. I certainly didn't think I did," Stroud said.

"This hearing is over with," were the final words spoken in the official transcript of that August 2, 2016, hearing.

Burch handed down his order 38 days later: "As to the first issue, the Court finds that Applicant was [sic] not denied a fair trial because of the State's (JR Joyner) remarks during closing arguments," Burch wrote.

READ: JUDGE PAUL BURCH'S ORDER FINDING NO PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT IN OSCAR FORTUNE'S MURDER TRIAL

The solicitor's remarks, while improper, are no so prejudicial to Applicant's substantial rights so as to deprive him of a fair trial, especially when combined with the accompanying objections of trial counsel and the curative comments of the trial judge," Burch found.

"So, now you have a judge saying, I'm wrong. That will probably be enough for a man to just give up, but I know that this is a violation. I've studied South Carolina law, I’ve studied federal law. I know that this is a violation because I've seen cases overturned for less than what this guy did; JR Joyner," Fortune told QCN.

Fortune, a "jailhouse lawyer" in his own right at this point, believed AG Alan Wilson and his group of taxpayer-funded attorneys were wrong.

"I also remember the attorney general saying, you can't raise that issue. That's not a PCR issue; that's a direct appeal issue. You were supposed to do that on your direct appeal. And I'm telling them, no, that's a constitutional violation. Constitutional violations can be raised on PCR. So, they're fighting me tooth and nail...And I'm saying, no, that's not true," Fortune said.

"Now here it is, you got me; uneducated, imprisoned, convicted of murder, telling them: educated, working for the attorney general that you are wrong, you're wrong. You have people who have raised these issues in the past, and you told them the same thing, and they believed it. But now I know what the Constitution is. Now I know what a constitutional violation is. So, you can't tell me I'm wrong," Fortune told Barr.

On Jan. 24, 2018, Fortune filed a request with the S.C. Supreme Court, asking the high court to set Judge Paul Burch straight in his refusal to grant him relief under PCR.

Fortune's family helped him hire an appellate heavyweight, Columbia attorney Elizabeth Franklin-Best. She filed Fortune's writ of certiorari with the state supreme court and waited for the S.C. Attorney General's Office to respond.

The AG's office responded six months later. The AG's brief listed three attorneys fighting against Fortune: Attorney General Alan Wilson, Senior Assistant Deputy Attorney General Megan Harrigan Jameson, and Assistant Attorney General Johnny Ellis James, Jr.

READ: S.C. ATTORNEY GENERAL'S OFFICE ARGUMENT AGAINST OSCAR FORTUNE'S PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT CLAIMS

The AG's office argued in its brief to the Supreme Court that Burch's findings regarding Joyner's jury closing comments "are well founded," and wrote multiple pages of argument to support both Burch's ruling and Joyner's comments.

Wilson's team's argument also fully supported Judge John Milling's "curative" instruction to the jury in response to Joyner's comments.

Oscar Fortune was inside the prison law library when a staffer with access to the internet came in, asking to see him, "So I’m like, what happened? I go to her office, she closes the door, and she pulls up my case, and she spins her last laptop around. And there it was: reverse and remanded for a new trial."

But that's not all S.C. Supreme Court opinion 27932 said. The 18-page opinion offered a scathing rebuke of every person involved in Fortune's legal battles: Assistant Solicitor JR Joyner, Trial Judge John Milling, PCR Judge Paul Burch, and the S.C. Attorney General's Office.

"Among the several blatantly improper comments the prosecutor made in his closing argument to the jury in Oscar Fortune's murder trial," was the opening scene of Justice John Cannon Few's opinion. It was a unanimous opinion with all five justices, including the chief justice, concurring with Few's opinion.

READ: S.C. SUPREME COURT'S UNANIMOUS OPINION ORDERING A NEW TRIAL FOR OSCAR FORTUNE

"The PCR court found the remarks were "improper." We find they were absolutely inexcusable. The assistant solicitor told the jury he had a statutory duty to screen cases, he suggested he had already determined Fortune was guilty, and he claimed he would have dismissed the case if he determined otherwise," Few wrote.

Joyner's jury comments are "universally condemned" by U.S. courts, Few wrote. “Courts have also condemned the specific misconduct in this case, when the prosecutor invokes his duty to dismiss unfounded cases and boasts of his responsibility to prosecute defendants the prosecutor knows to be guilty."

Few also pointed to a 1986 S.C. Supreme Court case where the state's high court "condemned this type of misconduct."

The court also wrote that Joyner "improperly characterized the role of defense counsel," and the court found "this misconduct is also inexcusable," according to the opinion.

The Supreme Court also wrote that the Attorney General's Office's arguments supporting the Joyner comments and Burch's finding that Fortune wasn't prejudiced by them were an attempt, "to justify or excuse the assistant solicitor's misconduct."

The opinion also took up whether the prosecution had evidence to prove Oscar Fortune wasn't acting in self-defense and murdered Anthony Shields.

"The evidence of who shot first was hotly disputed," Few wrote, "The State pointed to no element of self-defense where it presented overwhelming evidence the element did not exist...“…we disagree the evidence against Fortune was overwhelming.”

The Supreme Court also rebuked Judge Milling's instruction to the jury after Fortune's defense attorney objected to Joyner's comments in his closing, "...the trial judge's 'curative' instruction actually exacerbated the assistant solicitor's misconduct," Few wrote.

The supreme court agreed with Burch's finding that Joyner's comments were "improper," and acknowledged determining whether those comments violated Fortune's right to a fair trial, "is a tougher judgment call," however the court cited its finding in the 1986 case of State v. Thomas where a defendant got a new trial "...because - in our judgment - the solicitor's similarly improper closing argument required it," Few wrote in the high court's opinion.

Somehow, every person at every step of the way missed what the S.C. Supreme Court saw in Fortune's murder trial:

The assistant solicitor's improper statements to the jury during closing argumentinfected Fortune's trial with such a high degree of unfairness as to make hisconviction a denial of due process. We reverse the order of the PCR court denyingFortune relief and remand to the court of general sessions for a new trial.

AG: 'BECAUSE YOU'RE RUDE, JODY'

At every step of the appellate process in both of the cases we examined in our 'Objection' investigation, there was one state agency fighting against convicts complaining of injustices: the S.C. Attorney General's Office.

In State v. Pearson, the AG's office had Pearson's new trial award from the S.C. Court of Appeals overturned by the state supreme court after successfully arguing that the appeals court misapplied legal standards and erred in its decision.

We found no evidence that the AG's office knew of Pearson's innocence or Victor Weldon's March 2023 confession, exonerating Pearson in the 2010 ambush of Edward "Slick" Gibbons, until 15 months after the confession.

Yet, when the AG's office learned of Pearson's innocence after he filed a pro se Post Conviction Relief application with the AG's office asking for a new trial based on the Weldon confession, Clarendon County court records show no action from the AG's office in the 14 months that passed.

We also found no evidence in the record showing the AG's office did anything to investigate Pearson's innocence. Pearson's innocence attorney accused the local prosecutor, elected Solicitor Chip Finney, of knowing of his innocence in March 2023 and doing nothing to free him from prison for more than two years.

Through all of Pearson's appeals following his 2012 conviction and 60-year prison sentence, the AG's office assigned attorneys to fight for Pearson all along the way.

In Oscar Fortune's fight to undo what he called a "railroaded" conviction, he also had to fight against the AG's office at every step, from his direct appeal to his Post Conviction Relief fights.

On every document filed in both appellate cases we reviewed, the first lawyer's name representing "The State of South Carolina," was Attorney General Alan Wilson. We, as a news outlet exercising our rights as the free press, submitted a formal interview request to Wilson's office so he could explain the AG's role in the appellate process.

But Wilson's spokesman, Robert Kittle, initially ignored our request. The following week, I copied Wilson and the agency's second-in-charge, Jeff Young, to the email request and asked Kittle to give us the professional courtesy of a response.

Kittle responded the next day.

Yes, I received your emails. However, the Attorney General will not be doing any interviews with you after your unprofessional behavior the last time he talked to you. He showed up at your station to do an interview with another reporter, and you could have asked for 5 or 10 minutes to talk to him while he was there. But instead, you waited for him outside in the parking lot just so you could run up to him with a camera to make it look like you were chasing him down for dramatic effect.

We did, in fact, conduct an unscheduled interview with Wilson in June 2025 in the parking lot of our television station. What Kittle omitted from his response was the fact that weeks before that parking lot encounter, I asked him to schedule an interview with his boss.

Kittle and Wilson refused to schedule the interview.

We wanted to interview Wilson and have him explain his office's decision to dismiss every charge the AG's office filed in two of our news investigations: 'Lost Trust' and 'Final Disrespects.'

On December 14, 2021, the AG's office convinced the Marlboro County grand jury to indict sitting Sheriff Charles Lemon and former Deputy Andrew Cook over a jailhouse use of force case. The AG's indictment accused Lemon and Cook of felony assault and misconduct in office stemming from the video recording of the May 2020 incident.

The AG accused Lemon of ordering Cook, his subordinate, to use a Taser on Jarrel Johnson multiple times inside the jail. The state believed Lemon and Cook gained compliance from Johnson to "get in the cell," but continued shocking the inmate with no legal justification for doing so.

The AG's office held those charges over the men for two years and one month and never held a single court hearing to move the case to trial.

In January 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice convinced a federal grand jury in Florence, S.C. to indict the men, each on one count of a civil rights violation. Weeks later, the AG's office dismissed the state assault and misconduct charges.

Wilson has never explained why his office didn't pursue those prosecutions and abandoned them following the federal indictment.

Federal prosecutors won a conviction against Andrew Cook when the former deputy agreed to plead guilty and testify as a witness against Lemon. But, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Everett McMillian and Lauren Hummel lost their conviction against Lemon in August 2024 when the jury returned a not guilty verdict against the suspended sheriff.

In our 'Final Disrespects' investigation, sitting Marlboro County Deputy Probate Judge Tammy Bullock and her friends were accused of stealing property from a dead man's home in January 2021, while the man's dementia-stricken wife was inside.

Multiple surveillance cameras installed on the man's home captured the group going in and out of Hollis Slade's home while some in the group made several trips carrying items from the inside and placing them into their vehicles. Those cameras also captured Bullock and a woman named Charlotte Green rummaging through Slade's pickup truck.

“Oh, me and Tammy got four packs of cigarettes out of it; figured he didn’t need them no more,” Green said in one of the recordings.

The S.C. Law Enforcement Division spent months conducting interviews, reviewing financial records, and eventually turned its investigation over to the AG's office for a decision on whether to file charges. The AG's office took more than a year to decide whether a crime was committed.

In July 2023, SLED charged Bullock and Green with stealing a pistol, $2,203 in cash, and cigarettes from Hollis Slade’s pickup truck. None of the other people depicted in the video recordings was ever charged or formally accused of a crime.

In July 2024, without any public notice beforehand, the AG's office dismissed Charlotte Green's charges ,and her charging records were later removed from public access at the courthouse and destroyed. Kittle, in a July 15, 2024, email response to QCN, confirmed, “The theft charges against Charlotte Green have been disposed of. I can’t comment any further on that.”

The AG's office also dismissed Bullock's theft charges sometime in the first half of 2025. Bullock had also picked up a pointing and presenting a gun charge in early 2021, a charge the AG's office later indicted with Alan Wilson's name hand-signed to the indictment.

Wilson's refusal to interview with us to provide an explanation to the public about the prosecution actions of his office is why we were forced to find him and interview him in June 2025.

In October 2025, Kittle and Wilson again refused to schedule interviews to provide explanations to the public on the AG's office's handling of both the Pearson and Fortune cases. On Oct. 20, 2025, the Town of Coward put out a public notice on its roadside digital billboard, welcoming the public to a Wilson campaign stop at the Coward Community Center.

That's where we found Wilson to question him about the Pearson/Fortune appeals cases.

Wilson arrived in the same black Chevrolet Tahoe he slammed the door on us in that June 2025 parking lot interview. Wilson, as before, had a driver deliver him to the location.

"How are you doing, Mr. Wilson?" I asked Wilson as he stepped out of the front passenger door, "Hey, Jody, good to see you." Wilson kept walking and wasted no time getting inside the door. "Can you tell us why you and your office fought against Mr. Pearson’s innocence in State versus Michael Pearson?" I asked.

Wilson did not respond.

"How you been - you just slapped me with your shirt," the woman told Wilson as he walked past us and into the building. "I'm so sorry," Wilson told the woman as she escorted Wilson inside the building with her arm around him.

We recorded Wilson's speech, and he informed the crowd of just over 20 people that he'd take questions and the end. Figuring Wilson would not refuse to answer, I decided to wait my turn and ask him the questions I wanted to ask him if he agreed to sit for an interview.

After several minutes of taking questions and providing his answers, when it appeared the room was finished asking Wilson questions, I asked the group for permission to question Wilson, "Do you guys mind if I ask him a question real quick?”

"I know what question he’s going to ask," Wilson said as he leaned on the lectern at the front of the room. The crowd politely allowed us to ask our questions.

This is the transcript of that exchange:

BARR: “Mr. Wilson, in the next county over, two months ago…there was a man who was wrongfully convicted (Michael Pearson) and freed from prison. Every step of his appellate – every step, all of his appeals, even up to the Supreme Court, you and your office fought against this man’s innocence. Why is that? That’s the case of Michael Pearson.”

WILSON: “So, Jody, the way you ask the question, you ask it laced with assertions and innuendo and accusations, and that’s not the way a reporter should ask a question – but let me answer your question.”

Side bar: Honestly, Wilson was right. I could have crafted the question much better.

WILSON: "First off, I have 90 lawyers working in my office. I have between 340 and 350 employees. Between 90 lawyers and 300-plus employees, we manage 8,000 cases over a 15-year period. I cannot speak to the facts of every specific case. So, if you want to know about a specific case, then we can put the lawyers who are handling the case there, but I cannot speak to a specific case. But what I can tell you is, by law, our office is required to defend the state under post-conviction relief, as well as appellate law. So, somebody has to defend the state’s prosecution. I cannot speak to the facts of this assertion that you’ve baked into your question –”

BARR: “Even if the conviction is later found out it be wrongful and improper, you guys would defend that?”

WILSON: “I can’t speak to the specifics of the case, only to say there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of cases; I don’t know the facts of every single case. So, there have been times we have defended cases all the way through the appellate process, and because a case gets turned over, it doesn’t necessarily mean the person was innocent, just means there was some flaw in the legal system. At the end of the day, you’re asserting that I would be against someone, going after someone wrongfully, and prosecute them when I knew them to be innocent. That’s what you’re asserting in your question –”

BARR: “Well, the question is about, during the appellate process, does your office have any responsibility to investigate the claims made against the state?"

WILSON: “We can’t go outside the record, Jody. By law. On the record in the circuit court.”

BARR: “So, you don’t have any responsibility to investigate, but you do to solely –”

(WILSON'S HANDLER NAMED "ADDISON"): “Let’s get one more question from the audience, please!"

WILSON: “Addison, I’ve got this. I think I’ve answered your question…on appeal, we have the record that was created in the circuit court. That is the record that we have. Now, as to the specifics of this case, I can’t speak to it because I wasn’t the attorney of record on this case. There are thousands of – you can fuss at me all you want, you can disagree with the decisions of the office, but there are thousands and thousands of cases that our office does, all year long.”

BARR: “But I emailed you all about this weeks ago, and you wouldn’t schedule an interview, so we had to come down here.”

WILSON: “Because you’re rude, Jody.”

BARR: “I’m what?”

WILSON: “You’re rude."

The Attorney General then turned to the audience and continued his campaigning.

The record. Wilson asserted his office cannot operate outside the official record produced from a court proceeding. Whatever a defendant's counsel objects to and the court rules are basically the only issues the AG's office deals with on appeal.

That's an overly simplified explanation from a reporter who never even walked through the law school during my time attending the University of South Carolina.

But the record isn't the star of Post Conviction Relief cases. In those cases, new claims of evidence, procedure, or even complaints about a defense attorney's effectiveness are challenged. In PCR cases, there may be new investigations undertaken to verify claims made by convicted people about what they believe are injustices in their convictions.

Like in the Oscar Fortune case, where, right there in the record, was what his prosecutor told his jury before the 12 convicted him of murder. All five justices on the S.C. Supreme Court saw the Constitutional rights violation, but somehow no one else in the system saw it that way.

JUDGE: 'That really ticks me off'

In October 2022, the Supreme Court gave Oscar Fortune the new trial he spent 17 years fighting for. Fortune, as in 2006, drew his jury and a pair of new prosecutors out of Florence County went to work trying to convince the Chesterfield County jury he was a cold-blooded killer.

The trial lasted a week. On the Friday of the trial, the jury got the case and began deliberating.

A few hours later, Oscar Fortune was about to find out he couldn't get a fair trial a second time. As in the first trial, someone's misconduct got in the way.

"At 2:15 while I’m sitting here, I get this question signed by the foreman: ‘We were charged to assume innocence through the entire process. And we have people on our jury who have considered the defendant guilty since Monday. Is this a legal issue?" Judge J. Cordell Maddox then chuckled to himself.

He was visibly angry over the jury note he held in his hands, scribbled on a yellow piece of paper ripped from a legal pad. There really was only one answer here.

The jury was tainted. The entire retrial could've been a waste of everyone's time.

Both sides asked the judge to interview the jury foreman about the note. The attorneys were concerned that more than one juror had made his mind up about Fortune's guilt before a single piece of evidence or a word of testimony was spoken.

Maddox cleared the courtroom and called the foreman in, then called in the juror who wrote the note into the courtroom.

"I asked him, 'Was there a juror or jurors who did not presume the defendant to be innocent?' And his words were, and correct me if I'm wrong, he said that from his own mouth, that I knew he was guilty since Monday," Maddox told the reopened courtroom.

"And that really ticks me off," the judge said. Assistant Solicitor John Jepertinger asked Maddox to find the juror in contempt and jail him. "I echo the frustration," from the prosecution, but elected not to throw the Chesterfield County man in jail for his juror misconduct.

"This is a small community, and what I don't want is to create tensions after I leave, or after y’all leave by singling out one person for – look, the truth of this, judges – the worst-kept secret in the world for lawyers and judges, you always fear there is somebody like that. They just keep their mouth shut. And this guy just didn’t keep his mouth shut," Maddox said.

It wasn't a surprise when Maddox declared the mistrial. But his closing comments to both sides, including the Sheilds family, surprised a few in the gallery.

"The one thing I would say, after doing this for 21 years, this is obviously a terrible thing. And I'm not sure that that jury would have come back with the verdict, quite frankly, based upon some of the comments…I would urge you to try to resolve it without having to go through this again. This is awful. And one person is gone forever, and one person's been gone for 14 or 15 years. And I don't think that has done anybody any good. That's my personal opinion," Maddox told both sides.

"But at some point there's just – the community’s got to depend on families in that community to heal itself," the judge said before ending the trial.

And the prosecution and Fortune's defense team agreed with Judge Maddox's closing argument. A month later, both sides were back inside that same courtroom, presenting Judge Michael Nettles with a negotiated plea.

After two attempts to fairly convict Oscar Fortune of murder, the State of South Carolina offered to end its prosecution. If Fortune agreed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter, the prosecution would ask that he not serve another day in prison.

Both sides would walk away.

Fortune agreed to plead guilty, but with a catch. He wasn't admitting to intentionally killing Anthony Shields with no legal justification. No, Fortune still maintained he shot Sheilds in self-defense.

Fortune entered what's known as an "Alford Plea," a legal move that allows Fortune to accept responsibility while maintaining his innocence. The plea is also an acknowledgment that Fortune believed the state could possibly convict him if they continued trying him.

He was still subjected to a 30-year sentence, but Nettles accepted the plea and the prosecution's recommendation of crediting Fortune for the 5,456 days he'd already served in prison.

The plea allowed Fortune to end what he called the "16-year nightmare" of his fight to right the wrong done to him at trial. Nettles ordered Fortune to serve five years' probation, which ends in November 2027.

Oscar James Fortune walked out of the courtroom on Nov. 17, 2022, as free as a man can be under probation.

Looking back, Fortune said he holds no ill will toward JR Joyner for his jury comments. Joyner also would not respond to multiple interview requests we submitted to him more than a month before our reports aired.

"Do you blame JR Joyner for your trip to the penitentiary?” I asked Fortune during our sit-down interview on the eve of his jury deliberations in October 2022. "I think J.R. Joyner was just one ingredient in a perfect storm," Fortune told me. "And do I blame JR Joyner for my conviction? I'm going to be optimistic. I'm going to thank JR Joyner for the mistake he made, because that mistake got me out of prison.”

"And the reason I say that is this: even if JR Joyner wouldn't have said that, they were going to still convict me. So now you see why I thank JR Joyner for the mistake, instead of blaming him for the mistake?"

"That’s a hell of a way to put it,” I told him.

"That mistake is what got me out of prison," Fortune said.

The interview ended.

Hence then, the article about objection s c man railroaded in conviction fought ag s office for years for new trial was published today ( Saturday 01/11/2025 - 06:45 PM ) and is available on QUEEN CITY NEWS ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.

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