Saturday, April 17, 2004
RALEIGH
Though Darryl Hunt's case has divided politics along racial lines in Winston-Salem for 20 years, analysts see little political fallout for Democratic Gov. Mike Easley for pardoning Hunt this week in the middle of an election year.
After all, anyone who disagrees with granting a pardon to Hunt probably wasn't going to vote for Easley anyway, said Jack Fleer, a professor emeritus of political science at Wake Forest University.
"Conservatives have lots of reasons not to like Easley," Fleer said, pointing to a 2001 tax increase that Easley sought and his diversion of local money that forced many cities and counties to raise property taxes as examples of why conservatives would not vote to re-elect the governor.
After DNA tests showed that Hunt did not rape Deborah Sykes, another man confessed to the 1984 killing and a judge vacated the charges against Hunt, Easley granted a pardon of innocence to Hunt on Thursday, exonerating him of his 1990 murder conviction.
How much politics factored into the decision is a matter of speculation, because Easley and other governors have kept the pardon process private. Some observers recall the questions surrounding former Gov. Jim Hunt in 1984 when he allowed Velma Barfield to be executed while he was running for the U.S. Senate against conservative icon Jesse Helms.
Thad Beyle, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pointed to how George Ryan, in his last days as the governor of Illinois, got himself in political trouble by handing down too many pardons.
"He pardoned everybody, and he went out a fairly discredited governor," Beyle said.
Easley, a former district attorney and attorney general, has issued just two pardons of innocence in response to five requests since he became governor in 2001.
The other pardon was for Lesly Jean, a former U.S. Marine who was charged with rape and, like Hunt, was cleared by DNA evidence in 2001.
"He hasn't just been flipping these off like hamburgers. He's been very cautious about it," Fleer said.
The pardon will be symbolic for black voters who have closely followed Hunt's case, he said. "Obviously, blacks are going to be very interested in this particular decision not just in Winston-Salem, but broadly," Fleer said. "Because it's just another indication that you're more likely to be successfully prosecuted if you're an African-American accused of the rape and murder of a white woman."
White moderates and liberals are also likely to accept Easley's decision, Fleer said.
"They're likely to see there was an injustice here," he said.
And, Fleer said, although conservatives already have plenty of reasons to dislike Easley, Tom Keith, Forsyth County's district attorney, also supported a pardon for Hunt.
"It's a Republican district attorney who advocated a pardon to the governor. It will help it be seen as a reasonable, fair, just decision," Fleer said.
John Hood, the president of the conservative John Locke Foundation, said that the pardon for Hunt helps Easley avoid disgruntlement among black voters.
"I think that this avoids a potential problem for the governor, rather than creating a new one," Hood said. "It heads off a potential split between the governor and African-American Democrats."
With the death penalty under attack in many states and DNA tests revealing more falsely accused suspects, more and more governors must contend with pardon requests and their political consequences, Beyle said.
But given Easley's background as a district attorney and attorney general, Beyle said he suspects Easley was clinical, rather than political, with the Hunt case.
"He probably saw that the evidence wasn't there and that we as a judicial system made an error and we need to correct it," Beyle said.
In fact, Beyle said, accusations that Easley played politics by freeing a black man to galvanize support in the black community could backfire on anyone who makes them.
"It'd be hard for somebody to say he's just letting some of his supporters out of prison, because the evidence is so strong and the judge vacated the decision," he said.