The verdicts had been read. The gavel had fallen. For the state, it was just as served. For the families of five teenage boys, it was their futures disappearing.

Rayshon Banner, Nathaniel Cawthon, Jamal Tolliver, Christopher Bryant, and Darrell Brayboy. Five names now bound together by a crime they swore they

didn't commit. Five boys who walked into a courtroom as children and walked out in shackles, labeled

murderers. Their mothers wept as deputies led them away, and the city of Winston-Salem tried to move on.

But behind the headlines and the words justice served, something was still unsettled.

Because even after the verdicts, the questions never stopped.

The judge's words that day still echo through the record, his voice

final and unforgiving. He told the courtroom he had seldom seen less willingness to accept

responsibility or more resistance to showing remorse. He said the blood of Nathaniel Jones would

forever be on these individuals' hands.

But was the reason they couldn't show remorse because they had nothing to be remorseful for?

The judge's words meant to condemn would take on a different meaning in the years that followed.

What if the truth wasn't in the courtroom that day at all? What if it

was still waiting to be uncovered in an evidentiary hearing more than two decades later? From the

start, the Winston-Salem Five maintained their innocence. But it wasn't until decades later that people

finally began to listen.

Experts challenged the evidence.

Psychologists dissected the interrogations, and the prosecution's star witness recanted her testimony.

The physical evidence, untouched for more than 20 years, was finally tested for DNA, and the results were shocking.

The jurors in the Winston-Salem five trials heard two carefully curated versions of the truth,

shaped by objections, rules, and what the court allowed them to see.

But what about the story they never heard?

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