Darryl
Anthony Howard to get new trial
(DURHAM,
N.C.) -- Citing misconduct by a former prosecutor and a Durham, North Carolina
police detective, a judge on Tuesday ordered a new trial for a man who has
spent the past 19 years in prison for two murders he has always maintained he
did not commit.
A
North Carolina district court reversed a double murder conviction and ordered a
new trial for Darryl Anthony Howard based on both prosecutorial misconduct and
new DNA evidence pointing to other suspects.
Darryl
always maintained his innocence in the 1991 double homicide of Doris Washington
and her 13-year-old daughter, Nichanda. He was arrested for the crime nearly a
year after it occurred although there was never any physical evidence linking
him to the crime.
Durham
police detective Daryl Dowdy had testified that the crimes were never suspected
to involve a sexual assault despite clear physical evidence of sexual assault
to both victims.
The
nude bodies of the two were found in 1991 inside their apartment in at a public
housing complex in east Durham.
According
to a report by The News & Observer newspaper in Raleigh, " The case -
taken up by the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal organization that has
freed 18 wrongly convicted people from death row in its 22 years - casts a
spotlight again on the Durham justice system. It renews questions about the
integrity and fairness of prosecutors and police investigators in a city that
took a bruising from its handling of the Duke lacrosse case."
The
Duke lacrosse case was a 2006 criminal case resulting from what proved to be a
false accusation of rape made against three members of the men's lacrosse team
at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
The
fallout from the case's final resolution led to, among other things, the
disbarment of lead prosecutor Mike Nifong.
Through
open file discovery the Innocence Project uncovered a police memo, "That
reveals that Durham police received a detailed tip from a confidential
informant four days after the murders that the crimes involved sexual assault
and the victims were murdered by more than one perpetrator – information that
former prosecutor Mike Nifong never turned over to Darryl’s attorneys,"
according to a release by the Innocence Project
The
Project also said DNA testing before trial excluded Mr. Howard as the source of
biological evidence recovered from the daughter, and new DNA testing has
excluded him as the source of semen found in the mother.
The
prosecutorial misconduct in Darryl’s case casts doubt over the entire Durham
justice system since it was former prosecutor Nifong who was disbarred and held
in contempt for his actions in the Duke Lacrosse case, according to the
Innocence Project .
In
his order released Tuesday Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson wrote, "It
is undisputed that there was and is no physical evidence connecting Howard to
this crime scene or to these victims."
According
to the report by the The News & Observer sperm was found on the teen and
collected in an investigative rape kit. An autopsy showed that her mother had
been sexually assaulted. Howard was charged in the homicides, but DNA tests
excluded him as a match to the sexual assault evidence collected.
At
trial, Durham Police Detective D.L. Dowdy testified that he never suspected
that the murders involved sexual assaults and that he never investigated them
as such.
Nifong,
the assistant district attorney at the time repeated that claim to the jury and
suggested that the sperm on the teen was the result of consensual sex before
the murder.
But
the claims by both the prosecutor and investigator were contradicted by a
police memo that Nifong and Dowdy had in their files, a document uncovered within
the past decade by Innocence Project researchers and Jim Cooney, a Charlotte
attorney working with them.
A
few days after the bodies were found, police got a confidential tip that a drug
gang had murdered Doris Washington over an $8,000 drug debt and further the
tipster said the killers raped the mother before killing her, "And that
the daughter was raped and killed after unwittingly walking in on the
scene" according to the The News & Observer report.
