Law360 (August 11, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT) -- State prosecutors told a North Carolina Court of Appeals panel during arguments on Tuesday that a trial court judge overstepped by vacating the convictions of four men found guilty as teenagers of murdering NBA star Chris Paul's grandfather in 2002, saying the only remedy was to order a new trial.

The lower court reversed the convictions of defendants Nathaniel Cauthen, Rayshawn Banner, Jermal Tolliver and Christopher Bryant by granting their motion for appropriate relief, a mechanism by which criminal defendants in North Carolina can correct errors made before, during or after their trial. Citing new evidence, the lower court dismissed the charges against them with prejudice, preventing a local district attorney from prosecuting them again.

But according to Special Deputy Attorney General Heidi Williams, trial judges are not given unfettered discretion to award whatever relief they see fit under a motion for appropriate relief, or MAR.

"There are circumstances in the MAR context where dismissal of charges is an appropriate remedy," Williams said. But, she added, "these claims that were in front of the trial court here are not claims that justified dismissal of charges."

Williams argued the relief must be appropriate to the claims raised. Here, she said, if the trial court found there was newly discovered evidence that called into question the validity of the convictions, the case should have been reset to its pretrial posture so that the DA could review the evidence and decide whether to retry the defendants.

It was too speculative for the trial court to find there was no path to retrial, Williams argued, saying the judge "doesn't have a crystal ball and can't define with any certainty what the state's evidence would be at retrial."

According to Williams, the trial court can only make a determination about the scope of the state's evidence after a retrial, if the defendants choose to challenge their conviction based on the sufficiency of the evidence against them.

"The state's position here is simply that the MAR court jumped the line," she said. "They made a ruling about what the state's evidence would be at retrial before that evidence had been defined, and that went outside of the court's authority."

But Bradley Bannon of Patterson Harkavy LLP, who argued on behalf of all four defendants, told the panel the trial court acted within its discretion based on all the evidence before it.

"That authority is clear under the statute," he said, referring to the state law governing motions for appropriate relief. "It's right there. It is not constrained in any way by the statute. It's been there for 50 years."

While the statute has been amended in the intervening decades, Bannon said none of those changes cabined the trial court's authority to dismiss criminal charges when granting a motion for appropriate relief. Nor has the North Carolina Supreme Court or the state Court of Appeals ever imposed any limitations, he added.

"There is not a case that stands for the proposition or has ever held that dismissal is an inappropriate remedy for any of these claims or that a new trial is the only appropriate remedy for any of these claims," Bannon said.

According to the state's brief on appeal, Banner and Cauthen were tried jointly in 2004 and convicted by a jury of first-degree murder and robbery with a dangerous weapon in the death of 61-year-old Nathaniel Jones, who was robbed and killed at his home in Winston-Salem in 2002. Jones was the grandfather of Paul, a North Carolina native who played in the NBA for 21 seasons before retiring this year.

Banner and Cauthen were sentenced to life without possibility of parole.

Bryant, Tolliver and a fifth co-defendant, Dorrell Brayboy, were convicted in a separate trial of second-degree murder and robbery and sentenced to 13 to 16½ years in prison. They were released in 2017, according to the state. Brayboy was killed in 2019 and is not part of the appeal.

All five defendants were teenagers at the time of the crime and maintained their innocence, saying they were coerced by law enforcement to give false confessions.

After more than a decade of unsuccessful appeals and review from the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, the defendants filed motions for appropriate relief in 2023. The motions cited exculpatory DNA evidence and recanted testimony from Jessica Black, the state's key witness in their trial. They also raised claims of ineffective assistance of counsel.

In August 2025, a trial judge in Forsyth County found that Black's recantation and the DNA evidence, combined with developments in juvenile false confession research and the ineffective counsel claims, were sufficient to overturn the convictions.

Brannon, arguing Tuesday for the defendants, pointed to evidence in support of the trial judge's findings, saying 19 witnesses were called to testify during a three-week evidentiary hearing in support of his clients' innocence. He said the state, meanwhile, failed to call any witnesses of its own to dispute their claims.

The judge also deliberated for six months before issuing the 115-page order, Brannon said.

"With that record and no sufficient path to retrial beyond a reasonable doubt, there is nothing absurd about that," Brannon said of the trial court's decision to vacate the convictions.

During arguments, Judge Toby Hampson repeatedly returned to the fact that the panel is bound by the trial court's determinations and can only review for abuse of discretion.

"It heard the evidence on this and weighed the credibility of that evidence and gave it the weight it felt appropriate and made its decision," Judge Hampson said of the lower court. "I mean, if there's evidence to support the trial court's determination, what role do we have to simply throw out those weighing determinations?"

In response, Special Deputy Attorney General Nicholaos Vlahos, also representing the state, argued the trial court erred in its conclusions of law, even if the findings were supported by the evidence.

He said the mistakes in the conclusions of law warrant a reversal of the trial court's entire order. If the panel disagrees, Vlahos said, the panel can still reverse the dismissal with prejudice.

"At the very least, the DA's office should be allowed to re-prosecute these cases if it sees that they need to be," he said. "I mean, it's their constitutional duty to do so. And that's where the decision lies — not in the MAR court."

Judges John M. Tyson, Toby Hampson and Michael Stading sat on the panel for the Court of Appeals.

The state is represented by Heidi M. Williams and Nicholaos G. Vlahos of the North Carolina Department of Justice.

Banner and Cauthen are represented by Christine C. Mumma of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence.

Bryant is represented by Bradley Bannon of Patterson Harkavy LLP.

Tolliver is represented by Mark Rabil of the Wake Forest Innocence & Justice Clinic.

The case is State v. Banner, case number 25-1182, in the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

--Additional reporting by Marco Poggio and Parker Quinlan. Editing by Robert Rudinger.

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