Three of the defendants were convicted in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The others were convicted in Richmond City Circuit Court.

Officer Jason Norton joined the Richmond Police Department in 2004. He left in 2013, prior to the dismissals in these cases and a year before the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia uncovered problems with his search-warrant applications.

By then, according to a lawsuit later filed on behalf of five defendants who had their convictions vacated, Norton’s misconduct was already well-known within the police department and on the streets of Richmond.

As part of its inquiry, the FBI interviewed several men who said that Norton stopped and searched their vehicles, seized cash from them, but never gave them any documents that recorded the seizures In 2011, the police department formally reprimanded Norton for seizing marijuana and cocaine from an individual without making an arrest. Norton claimed he hoped to set the individual up as an informant, but he never registered the person. In addition, the department found that signatures on forms used by confidential informants to receive money appeared to be forged.

Court records indicate that Norton appeared on the FBI’s radar as far back as 2010, when he tried unsuccessfully to dissuade federal agents from arresting one of his informants, known as R.A., as part of operations of a state-federal drug task force.

The wrongful convictions attributed to Norton all involved the use of evidence from confidential informants in search-warrant applications. The confidential informants on the applications in question in these cases were sometimes entirely anonymous or other times only identified by a number.

Every warrant application that relies on a confidential informant must include a section on the informant, known as a resume, which states how long the informant has been helping the police, what arrests can be attributed to the informant’s work, and related details. This section is used to establish the reliability of the informant when judges or magistrates review the warrant application.

On January 20, 2009, state and federal officers executed a search warrant on a residence and arrested Wilber Ensley, charging him with several cocaine possession counts. The warrant application that Norton filled out identified C.I 933 as the “reliable informant” who told Norton about illegal activity at the residence. Ensley pled guilty to possession with intent to distribute cocaine in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on April 13, 2009, and was sentenced to 262 months in federal prison.

Federal agents examining the search warrants in this case and others in 2014 found several problems. First, the resumes for C.I. 933 and C.I. 757 were nearly identical, differing only in the amount of time Norton said the informants had been helping the police. In addition, C.I. 933 had been paid $500 for his assistance, which required that he sign a form acknowledging the payment. The FBI noticed that the signature did not look like C.I. 933’s signature, and the informant, later identified as R.A., subsequently confirmed with the FBI that he did not sign it.

Separately, the receipts for these transactions are supposed to be witnessed by a third party. But the officer whose signature appeared on the form said he did not actually see the exchange take place; he signed the form ahead of time, which was a common practice at the police department.

Judge Henry Hudson of U.S. District Court vacated Ensley’s conviction on April 1, 2015. He noted that the “government concedes that there is a high probability that critical information contained in the search warrant affidavit is false and that it is material to a finding of probable cause.”

The government dismissed the charge on April 2, 2015, and Ensley was released from federal prison. Two other defendants, Covey Andrews and Shamar Archer, also had their federal convictions on drug and gun crimes vacated and charges dismissed that day.

According to documents filed as part of the FBI’s investigation and later incorporated into civil lawsuits, Norton’s misconduct with search-warrant applications involved several areas beyond apparently cutting-and-pasting resumes. In other instances, the information entered about the same informant was inconsistent and illogical over time. In the case of C.I. 757, Norton said in a warrant application in March 2010 that the informant had helped arrest 13 individuals involved with drug dealing. Two years later, the informant’s contributions had dropped to only six people. Norton also appeared to have inflated the resumes of his informants, stating at least once that an informant had helped in the investigation of a homicide, when there was no record of that assistance. Finally, many of the signatures on the reports confirming payments to the informants appeared to be fake, and when the FBI interviewed these informants about their statements, several also confirmed that they did not provided the information that Norton said they provided.

Patrick Dorgan, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that if an informant provided the evidence to obtain seven search warrants, a consistent resume would be expected in each application.

“Generally speaking, this guy’s resume on the seven search warrants should be consistent. But you lay them out across the table and they’re wholly inconsistent,” Dorgan said.  Or, he said, Norton “gives the exact same resume for two completely different individuals. You put them side by side and it's exactly the same, to a T.”

Another prosecutor told the newspaper that Norton’s misconduct likely went undetected because the search-warrant applications came through one at a time, making it harder for magistrates to compare resumes. Norton and other officers stopped Curtis Williams on July 7, 2009 at 7 p.m. Williams did not consent to a search, and Norton applied for a search warrant, basing the request in part on information received from a confidential informant. The magistrate granted the warrant by 7:37 p.m. The warrant application did not identify the informant by number, but a later comparison of the informant’s resume showed it was nearly identical to resumes for two numbered informants and two unidentified informants. In addition, the resume stated that Norton had been working with the informant for only two months, that their relationship had already led to searches of 14 dwellings, at least 16 arrests, and convictions in both state and federal court.

“As anyone in the criminal justice field knows, this is an almost facially unbelievable resume,” attorneys for Williams would later state. Williams pled guilty in Richmond City Circuit Court to possession of cocaine on December 11, 2009, and was sentenced to two years in prison. On September 15, 2015, prosecutors filed a motion to vacate his conviction, stating that there was “clear and convincing evidence that fraud occurred in this case.” The motion was granted on April 12, 2016, and the charge was then dismissed.

Based on available records, Christopher Holmes of Richmond was the only defendant to take his case to trial. Norton arrested him on December 22, 2010, and charged Holmes with four drug and three weapons violations. Norton later testified about the search warrant at a suppression hearing and at Holmes’s bench trial in late 2011, where he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. After the federal convictions were vacated, Holmes filed a motion to vacate his conviction. A Virginia court granted his motion on January 26, 2016, and dismissed the charges on March 14, 2016.

In ruling to vacate Holmes’s conviction, Judge Beverly Smulkals of Richmond City Circuit Court found that Norton’s “pervasive pattern of perjury outside this case involving the history and reliability of confidential informants constitutes extrinsic fraud.” Most of the persons arrested by Norton appeared in Richmond City Circuit Court.

Following the dismissals in federal court, Michael Herring, Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney at the time, examined 100 convictions involving Norton to see whether improper search warrants played a part. Herring’s office moved to vacate and dismiss the charges in 12 convictions. Virginia law hampered the process because it allows only 21 days, with few exceptions, for judges to conduct post-conviction reviews based on new evidence.

The prosecutors argued that the fraud committed by Norton constituted a clear exception. Most but not all judges agreed with the prosecutors. Judge Bradley Cavedo of Richmond City Circuit Court denied a joint request by prosecutors and attorneys representing DaQuon Terry to vacate his conviction. Cavedo ruled that the evidence of fraud wasn’t convincing. The Supreme Court of Virginia upheld Cavedo on appeal in 2018, agreeing that the evidence of Norton’s fraud was “speculative.”

Nine defendants who were wrongfully convicted based in part on Norton’s search-warrant applications filed federal civil-rights lawsuits against Norton and the Richmond Police Department. Although none of the claims suggests that the plaintiffs did not possess drugs or guns, they note that Norton’s misrepresentations on the applications outweighed any potentially illegal activity.

“If an officer lies about an informant’s resume, the informant’s reliability has never actually been established and the resulting warrant is invalid,” wrote attorneys for Williams and Johnson. “If a warrant is invalid, then so, too, is any resulting arrest and period of detention—even if it lasts for years.”

According to public records, the city settled with the nine plaintiffs, paying them a total of $147,500. The office of the Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney joined the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in their 2014 investigation of Norton. Federal authorities decided not to prosecute Norton, and state prosecutors began pursuing their own investigation.

In June 2015, Herring asked the state courts to appoint a special prosecutor to avoid conflicts of interest. The courts appointed Colin Stolle, the Virginia Beach Commonwealth’s Attorney, on June 11, 2015. His office spent nearly five years on the investigation and issued a report on May 20, 2020, that said there was insufficient evidence to charge Norton with perjury, forgery, or embezzlement.

“Although Norton’s behavior may be perceived as suspicious, the lack of reliable witnesses and incomplete or missing documentation, as well as a complete absence of recordkeeping by not only Norton, but other members of the Richmond Police Department, prohibit us from pursuing any criminal charges in this matter,” Stolle wrote. Stolle said that while there was evidence suggesting problems with Norton’s honesty, “there was even more evidence that suggested that Norton was unable to meet basic standards of administrative competence.”

– Ken Otterbourg

Members of this group

Here are the defendants who had their convictions vacated based on the misconduct of former Officer Jason Norton: ​Dominique Adams, Covey Andrews, Shamar Archer, Wali Bahar, Corey Beale, Wilber Ensley, Jamar Gilliam, Deunte Humphries, Christopher Holmes, Bravette Johnson, Andre Minns, Wilbur Olivis, Marco Thomas, Tyquon Terry, Curtis Williams.