Friday, February 20, 2004
RALEIGH
District Attorney Tom Keith of Forsyth County met with Gov. Mike Easley's attorney yesterday to start preparing Easley to consider a pardon for Darryl Hunt.
But Easley said he is still waiting for a formal request from Hunt's attorneys before he can contemplate a pardon.
"I'm aware of it. I'm just waiting to get the information," Easley said as he left the state Capitol yesterday after hearing a clemency appeal for a death-row inmate who is scheduled to be executed next week for killing a Winston-Salem police officer.
The last time that Easley had a similar application - to pardon Lesly Jean after DNA evidence cleared Jean in the rape of a Jacksonville woman - he issued a pardon four days after he received the request in February 2001.
Hunt was convicted twice of murder in the 1984 stabbing of Deborah Sykes, a newspaper copy editor, in downtown Winston-Salem. But he was cleared by DNA evidence late last year. The DNA tests identified Willard Brown, who confessed to the killing in December and who said he acted alone.
Mark Rabil, Hunt's attorney, said he plans to send a letter requesting a pardon from Easley today.
After the clemency hearing yesterday, Keith delivered his own motion to vacate the charges against Hunt, as well as Superior Court Judge Anderson Cromer's order dismissing the charges and photos of Hunt and Brown to Easley's attorney, Reuben Young.
"This is a factually complex case, and we're just here to help him start understanding the facts," Keith said.
Hunt's attorneys say that they intend to ask for what is known as a "pardon of innocence." It would entitle Hunt to $360,000 in compensation for his wrongful conviction.
Although the factors that Easley can take into account aren't entirely clear, Ernie Seneca, a spokesman for Easley, said that the review can include follow-up interviews with prosecutors, defense attorneys and victims.
Seneca said that under state law "the governor has broad discretion and latitude in considering the petition."
"You're allowed to look at facts and evidence that were not or could not be considered by the courts," Seneca said.
Keith said yesterday that he doesn't believe Hunt was present when Sykes was raped and killed along West End Boulevard in August 1984, but he's not sure that he can prove it.
"I don't think he was there," he said. "I can't say I know he is innocent. I can't say anyone is innocent.
"The evidence does show that Darryl Hunt didn't rape and didn't murder Deborah Sykes. Anything I go beyond that is just conjecture and gut feeling," he said.
But Richard Rosen, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a member of the state's Commission on Actual Innocence, said that the law is intended to apply to people such as Hunt who have been wrongly convicted.
"There's a pardon of forgiveness and a pardon of innocence, which says you didn't do the crime - which is what Tom Keith says," Rosen said. "A pardon of innocence is, 'I'm going to pardon you because you didn't commit the crime.'"
Seneca said that when Easley does receive a pardon application, "we will review it as quickly as possible."
When DNA testing cleared Ronald Cotton in 1995 of the rapes of two Burlington women in 1984, then-Gov. Jim Hunt waited more than six months to pardon Cotton.
Hunt received a pardon application for Cotton on Jan. 1, 1995, and granted a pardon on July 12, 1995.
But when Easley received a request to pardon Lesly Jean on Feb. 5, 2001, he granted the pardon four days later, on Feb. 9, 2001.