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Isaac Wright, Jr.

Other New Jersey exonerations
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On July 25, 1989, police arrested 11 people on charges of operating a $20 million-a-year cocaine distribution network in Somerset and Middlesex Counties in New Jersey. Somerset County Prosecutor Nicholas Bissell Jr. announced the arrests the following day and declared that the drug ring was overseen by 28-year-old Isaac Wright Jr.

Bissell said the arrests culminated a nine-month investigation called “Operation Bundle Man.” The name referred to what Bissell said was the ring’s practice of selling bundles of cocaine vials. According to Bissell, the ring was selling 3,000 vials – about 1.5 pounds – per day for about a year. Wright was a music producer and had co-founded a singing group, The Cover Girls, which included his wife, Sunshine Wright.

By the time Wright came to trial in Somerset County Superior Court, eight of the defendants had pled guilty and agreed to cooperate with the prosecution, and charges against two others had been dismissed.

One of the prosecution’s key witnesses was Roberto Alexander, who testified that he sold Wright half a kilogram - 1.1 pounds - of cocaine on July 25, 1989. Alexander had pled guilty and was facing a 15-year prison term. Alexander said Wright had agreed to pay $8,000 within two weeks for the cocaine. Alexander said that seconds after he handed the cocaine to Wright, numerous police officers ran into the street and arrested them.

Alexander claimed that until a month before the arrest, he had never mentioned cocaine to Wright. Alexander claimed that he had the cocaine in his house and that he “wanted to get them out of the house. Isaac said he would try to find someone who could buy them."

During cross-examination by Wright, who was representing himself, Alexander agreed that Wright did agree to meet with him, but brought someone else who wanted to buy the drugs. Alexander agreed that a major reason he had pled guilty was that the state agreed to drop all charges pending against his wife and his brother.

Police officers testified that they had obtained search warrants which resulted in the seizure of cocaine from Alexander’s home. Prior to the trial, defense lawyers had challenged that seizure and others as the product of illegal searches. The judge had upheld the searches, which prompted the guilty pleas from all but Wright.

Two other co-defendants also testified against Wright and claimed that they worked for him and brought him up to $70,000 a week in drug profits. They claimed Wright brought the cocaine to a house in New Brunswick, New Jersey where it was packaged, and then they sold it at apartment complexes.

Police officers testified that in February 1989, they arrested Earnest Earvin, who was believed to be a high-level distributor for Wright. Earvin was pulled over while driving Wright's car and then fled to Wright's nearby apartment, where he was arrested.

A telephone pager issued to Wright was found on Earvin, while more than 900 vials of cocaine were found in the car, along with 1,500 empty vials and other drug paraphernalia.

The trial was rocked when one witness, Willie Sirmans, recanted his testimony implicating Wright. He said he had agreed to plead guilty and cooperate because he wanted to avoid a long prison term. Sirmans testified he would “say anything” to avoid going to prison. He said he had faced up to 50 years and that as a result of his plea agreement, he would likely serve about 189 months.

Bissell confronted Sirmans with his testimony at his plea hearing that Wright was the kingpin of the drug ring. “I don’t care what it says,” Sirmans said. “None of that is true. In this place [Somerset County], all you have to do is say Isaac and you can get whatever you want.”

On April 23, 1991, Wright testified and denied any involvement in the sale of cocaine. He urged the jury to “make history” by acquitting him of charges that he said were the product of “lies and deceit.”

“I’ve done some questionable things in my life, but I am not a drug dealer,” Wright said. He asked the jury to wonder why he was renting a modest condominium if he were actually raking in tens of thousands of dollars every week.

"Before you is a man who had to finance five- and six-year-old cars. A man who when arrested had $90 in his pocket, $645 in his home and $143 in the bank," Wright said. "This entire case is based on a lie - all motivated by jealousy, vindictiveness and racial selectiveness.”

Wright said the drug ring was headed by Earvin and that the drugs found on Earvin were only Earvin’s, not Wright’s.

On April 26, 1991, the jury convicted Wright of 10 charges of drug possession and sale, including a charge of being a leader of a narcotics network. In May 1991, Wright was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for at least 30 years.

Two months later, in July 1991, Wright filed a lawsuit against Bissell, police officers, and Somerset County. The lawsuit alleged that the prosecution had suborned perjury and falsely arrested him without cause. The lawsuit was put on hold pending the outcome of Wright’s appeal of his criminal convictions.

While in prison, Wright focused on doing legal work for other prisoners as well as working on his own case. He came up with a new argument challenging the jury instructions in the drug kingpin charge, claiming that the instructions given at another prisoner’s trial—that of Ryan Lee Alexander—were contrary to the legislature’s intention when it passed the kingpin statute.

Alexander's convcition under the kingpin statute was reversed, although his other drug possession charges were affirmed. Wright then applied the kingpin argument to his own case. He contended that the instruction given to his jury did not define or explain the role of a leader of a drug kingpin or the necessity for the jury to make a determination that Wright had performed such a role.

In 1995, the New Jersey Appellate Division vacated Wright’s conviction on the drug kingpin charge, agreeing that the jury had not been correctly instructed. The court affirmed his convictions on the other nine charges.

The prosecution appealed. In May 1996, the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the appellate court’s decision, ruling that the trial court judge Michael Imbriani had given erroneous jury instructions on the kingpin charge. The court ordered Wright be granted a new trial or be resentenced. By that time, Imbriani was no longer a judge. He had pled guilty to stealing from business partners.

Wright then filed a motion for post-conviction relief. On December 18, 1996, he was released on bail. By that time, Bissell had been convicted and had fatally shot himself.

Bissell’s unraveling was triggered by another cocaine case. In May 1992, James Giuffre had filed a lawsuit against Bissell and several detectives claiming that after he was arrested on a cocaine charge, Bissell promised to dismiss the charges if Giuffre would forfeit property worth about $174,000. The property was later sold at an auction for $20,000 to Richard Thornburg, the chief of detectives and a close friend of Bissell.

Giuffre had contacted the Internal Revenue Service, and, in 1995, the U.S. Attorney’s Office had begun conducting a federal investigation of Bissell. In September 1995, Bissell and his wife had been indicted on federal tax and fraud charges. In February 1996, Giuffre had settled his lawsuit for $435,000. In May 1996, Bissell and his wife were convicted in federal court. Bissell was released pending sentencing, but required to wear an electronic monitoring device. He cut it off on November 18, 1996 and fled to Nevada. On November 27, 1996, as federal marshals confronted him in his hotel room at a casino in Laughlin, Nevada, Bissell shot himself to death after saying he could not go to prison.

On December 3, 1997, following a series of hearings, during which two of the prosecution witnesses had recanted their trial testimony and admitted they falsely implicated Wright, Superior Court Judge Leonard Arnold dismissed the remaining charges against Wright.

The judge ruled that Bissell had concealed evidence of a deal with one of the prosecution witnesses and allowed the witness to testify falsely. The judge also ruled that the police had covered up that they falsified search warrants.

Arnold concluded that Bissell had to have been aware that most of the cocaine used to convict Wright on drug dealing charges in 1991 had been illegally seized. By allowing the case to go forward anyway, Arnold said, Bissell and Thornburg had violated Wright's constitutional rights.

"This is a case in which the highest-ranking police officials in this county blatantly disregarded constitutional law," Arnold said.

During the hearing leading up to Arnold’s ruling, Thornburg and James Dugan, a former county detective, both acknowledged they knew on the day Wright was arrested that more than four pounds of cocaine had been seized illegally at Alexander’s Passaic home. Detectives had entered Alexander's home without a warrant and had spotted the cocaine in a basement closet. They then applied for a search warrant and did not report that the drugs already had been found in the area they wanted to search. Dugan would later plead guilty to filing a false police report.

Judge Arnold ruled that Bissell had made a secret plea deal with Rhoda White, one of the co-defendants, in exchange for her testimony implicating Wright. The judge said Bissell was "obsessed" with getting a conviction.

"They wanted to be sure they got this defendant," Judge Arnold declared.

On July 2, 1998, the prosecution dismissed the remaining charges against Wright.

In May 2005, Wright settled his civil lawsuit for $487,000. In 2007, Wright earned a law degree from St. Thomas University School of Law. In 2017, he was admitted to the New Jersey bar.

In 2020, a television series, For Life, based on Wright’s life, was aired. In 2021, Wright ran for mayor of New York City. In 2022, Wright published a memoir, Marked for Life: One Man’s Fight for Justice from the Inside.

– Maurice Possley

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Posting Date: 5/10/2023
Last Updated: 5/10/2023
State:New Jersey
County:Somerset
Most Serious Crime:Drug Possession or Sale
Additional Convictions:
Reported Crime Date:1989
Convicted:1991
Exonerated:1998
Sentence:Life
Race/Ethnicity:Black
Sex:Male
Age at the date of reported crime:28
Contributing Factors:Perjury or False Accusation, Official Misconduct
Did DNA evidence contribute to the exoneration?:No