Yet another Norwood.Law client is being compensated for a nightmare in the form of wrongful conviction.
Corey Atchison in 2019 was declared innocent and set free from a Tulsa street killing that occurred all the way back on Aug. 3, 1990.
He spent 28 years in Oklahoma’s brutal prison system before a judge stepped in after studying Norwood.Law’s argument that Atchison was obviously innocent.
Now Tulsa city officials have approved a $4.5 million payout to Atchison for wrongly imprisoning him. He was declared fully innocent and set free by a Tulsa judge in 2019.
The judge condemned the government’s case as a “fundamental miscarriage of justice.”
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All five were eventually declared fully innocent.
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Autonomy
In fact, according to a federal lawsuit we later filed against the government, Tulsa had interrogators pressured Norwood.Law client Corey Atchison to confess to killing James Lane.
They told Atchison that his friends had already snitched and were pointing the finger at him.
Atchison wouldn’t confess. It took him three decades to prove the government wrong.
With our help so many years later, Atchison is now being compensated for his distressing treatment at the hands of the government.
Atchison was convicted in 1991 of shooting and killing a young man named James Lane. He was sentenced to life in prison.
From the lawsuit we filed for Atchison:
“[He] has been deprived of all the basic pleasures of human experience, which all free people enjoy as a matter of right, including the freedom to live one’s life as an autonomous human being.”
Eyewitness
Corey Atchison had only wanted to help the night he approached the victim of a Tulsa street shooting who was still alive. That’s according to a friend who also later said:
“Everyone else in the car told Corey that it was a bad idea. … [But] Corey was determined to help the guy, and the guy was still alive at that time.”
Interrogators during the initial investigation had pushed Atchison to confess to killing Lane. They told Atchison that his friends had already snitched and were pointing the finger at him.
Atchison throughout insisted he’d done nothing wrong. He told a Tulsa podcast about that night:
“I know when I got over there, and I saw the dude laying down, I was trying to get him some help. I was like, ‘Somebody call an ambulance! Somebody call the police!’ He was still breathing. Before long, the police arrived.”
Unearthed
Even though Corey Atchison didn’t match the descriptions given by witnesses, police nonetheless became obsessed with him.
That’s even though one witness recognized the shooter by name as someone other than Atchison. But Norwood.Law only discovered these crucial statements in 2018. This alternative suspect had three felony convictions before he was 21.
But there’s no meaningful evidence in available records that police took this suspect seriously.
It’s extraordinary to consider how long Atchison would have languished behind bars if Norwood.Law hadn’t unearthed this report.
There’s more. A young star witness revealed 26 years after the trial that a Tulsa prosecutor had rehearsed his testimony with him and coached him.
Key facts:
- No physical evidence of any kind ever tied Atchison to the shooting.
- Atchison was convicted by the testimony of only one eyewitness who recanted 26 years later.
- One witness repeatedly said Atchison arrived on the scene only after the shooting and that he had yelled for someone to call 911.
- A total of three teenaged witnesses recanted their testimony against Atchison and said they were coerced by Tulsa law enforcement. Two recanted on the witness stand.
Costly
Corey Atchison isn’t the only one.
In the past year alone, Tulsa city leaders have been forced to pay out $45 million for legal settlements over wrongful convictions.
In one of those cases, two other of our wrongfully convicted clients settled a lawsuit with the city of Tulsa in October of 2025 for $15 million.
Astonishingly, Atchison’s brother was one of those two men. Atchison’s prosecution closely resembled the case against the brother, Malcolm Scott.
One Tulsa police detective had worked both cases.
This brother and a co-defendant were finally declared innocent after the men had spent over 20 years in Oklahoma’s grueling prison system for murder.
Said Atchison about his own brother’s wrongful conviction:
“I always protected him. I felt I always needed to protect him. … When he got convicted, I was real angry. It was like opening up a wound again. It really hurt.”
Gangland
So why did a Tulsa judge ultimately choose to set Atchison free? She cited several factors:
- There was no physical evidence connecting Atchison to the crime.
- Authorities relied solely on highly questionable eyewitnesses.
- The teenaged witnesses who named Atchison “were coerced.”
- “Everybody realizes that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable.”
- The tactics of law enforcement were “appalling.”
- Attempts by prosecutors to frame Lane’s murder as a gangland killing were bogus.
- The city of Tulsa admitted that the recordings of two witness interviews disappeared.
Years after Atchison was sent to prison, witnesses had begun to make extraordinary admissions about what really happened.
These witnesses recanted their previous statements against Atchison. They said authorities during the investigation had coerced them into naming him as the shooter.
Said one witness:
“The detectives told me that I couldn’t leave unless I gave them a statement about Corey. They told me that once I gave the statement that Corey shot James Lane, then I could go home. … I didn’t want to lie and say that Corey killed James Lane. … I remember feeling so ashamed of lying about Corey the whole time I was being video-recorded by the detectives.”
Appalled
The lawsuit filed on behalf of Atchison in 2021 alleged that Tulsa had been the center of “a large number of wrongful arrests, prosecutions, and/or convictions stemming from misconduct similar to what occurred” with the Atchison case.
In both the Corey Atchison and Malcolm Scott cases, witnesses said they were coerced by police into naming them as the killers.
A witness central to the Corey Atchison case initially told police that he had not seen the shooting. That witness said threats and coercion from police changed his story to fit a narrative.
So the witness painted a vivid but untrue picture of Atchison and his friends coldly executing James Lane in the street.
It sounds written for Netflix.
Joseph M. Norwood is a Tulsa attorney with the courtroom expertise you need. Contact his office at 918-582-6464.