Va. man Michael Wayne Hash has murder charges dismissed after 12 years in prison

“It was almost like I was present, but I wasn’t,” he said.

Hash has maintained his innocence from the beginning.

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There was no physical evidence connecting him to the crime.

But one of the other suspects testified against him. (That suspect served nearly seven years in jail. Last year he recanted his testimony and said he had no reason to believe Hash had anything to do with the slaying.) An estranged cousin said she had heard the three teenage boys talking about the killing. And a drug dealer who was briefly in the same cellblock said Hash had confessed to the crime.

The third suspect, who police had said was the ringleader, had already been acquitted.

Throughout his trial, Hash said, he believed he would be acquitted: The stories didn’t add up. It seemed clear that witnesses were lying and that he knew nothing about Scroggins’s death.

Then he heard the verdict.

“Everything went blank,” he said. The next morning, he woke up in the “hole” — solitary confinement, where officers kept him on a 24-hour suicide watch in the days after the trial — when someone shoved a newspaper underneath the door with a bang. On the front page was a big picture of his face and the headline “Hash found guilty.”

He said that was when he realized he had not just woken up from a bad dream. He was awake. And it was real.

New resolve

It wasn’t until he got to state prison that Hash was able to snap out of a long period of depression. Another inmate told him he had to defend himself, “to get my hands on every document that I could pertaining to my case,” Hash said.

The thing that kept him going, he said, “was just my resolve that I was innocent. This was not going to be final. I was not going to accept it.”

Other people began to help. His mother found letters that raised doubts about one witness. Shawn Armbrust at the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project took on his case, and lawyers from a firm, Hunton & Williams, volunteered to help. Stanley Lapekas, an investigator with the firm, began digging into the original suspect in the case — even finding his gun, which could not be ruled out as the slaying weapon by state experts.

In February, Senior U.S. District Judge James Turk ruled that Hash was being wrongly held and that he had satisfied the legal standard for actual innocence. Turk cited problems with the investigation, the prosecution and Hash’s trial counsel, including the acknowledgment late last year by former Culpeper County sheriff Lee Hart and then-Commonwealth’s Attorney Gary Close that Hash had been moved to another jail in order to expose him to a known informant; that investigators had provided crime-scene information to at least one witness and guided answers to their questions; that two witnesses had failed polygraph tests and one had since recanted his testimony; and that there is significant evidence that another suspect may have committed the crime.

Morrogh was appointed special prosecutor and given six months to decide whether the commonwealth should retry Hash.

Still not free

From the moment he was released on bail, Hash knew he wasn’t really free.