Throughout his life, Richard McGough has been a tireless proponent of civil rights who uses his remarkable skills to free the wrongfully convicted and incarcerated. He was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1954, and first became involved in progressive activism as a high school student in the early 1970s. This was a period of massive change in North Carolina, especially around the integration of public schools. Richard was one of the few white students who actively supported the “Wilmington 10,” a group of nine men and one woman who were wrongfully convicted of arson and conspiracy for their efforts to desegregate Wilmington’s schools and to fight the endemic racism that afflicted the region. Around the same time McGough expressed his opposition to the Vietnam War by moving to Canada rather than be drafted. Following the decision to end the draft, Richard moved back to the United States and became a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Richard entered a Ph.D. program in cultural anthropology while at Chapel Hill that led him to do fieldwork in Ecuador, interviewing cultural groups and indigenous peoples who were fighting political corruption in the region. During this time, he was trained in two valuable skills—fluency in Spanish and the art of listening—both of which would prove useful in his later career as a private investigator and certified expert in capital case litigation. Witnessing the deep poverty of Central America and the effects of the war in El Salvador led McGough to become a dedicated leftist. He ultimately discontinued his graduate work in cultural anthropology and became an organizer for the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina, and became involved with the Christic Institute, a left-wing legal group that worked on the Karen Silkwood case, the Iran Contra Affair, and the Greensboro Massacre. During that period Richard worked closely with Lewis Pitts, a lawyer with the Christic Institute who is also featured in this archive. In the late 1980s, after receiving his North Carolina private investigator’s license, McGough took on the biggest cases of his career. Darryl Hunt, an African-American man, was wrongfully convicted of a gruesome rape-murder by a prosecutor who willfully ignored evidence that would have led to the actual killer. Working closely with Mark Rabil, Hunt’s defense attorney, over a 19-year period, and with Phoebe Zerwick, the journalist who helped break open the case, Richard was able to obtain DNA samples that ultimately led to Darryl Hunt’s exoneration. (Both Zerwick and Rabil are featured in this archive.) In the last decade or so, Richard has become a national expert on mitigation for capital murder cases; most of his cases involved African-American individuals who have suffered under a racist justice system bent on punishment and blinded by deeply held hatred. Now retired, McGough continues his justice work with Wake Forest University’s Innocence and Justice Project, which is led by Mark Rabil. With Rabil, McGough is working to address secondary trauma as an outgrowth of incarceration.