Earlier that day, a judge threw out Howard’s double-murder conviction and allowed him to go home after 21 years in prison.
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“A reasonable juror would find beyond reasonable doubt that here is a reasonable doubt to the guilt of Darryl Howard in these cases”, Hudson said before vacating the convictions Wednesday.
The judge had previously been in favour of ordering Howard’s release two years ago, calling it “a horrendous prosecution” which ignored “there was extremely credible, strong evidence that Mr. Howard did not commit” the crime.
Darryl Howard walked out of the Durham County jail on Wednesday afternoon, and he and his wife walked hand-in-hand in front of the courthouse. He said he’s looking forward to building a life with Nannie, whom he married three years after his imprisonment.
He credits her with reaching out to lawyers around the country who work on wrongful conviction cases. “I am hopeful that the DA’s office will not re-try the case”, said Seema Saifee, a staff attorney with the Innocence Project, who worked on Howard’s case. However, a state appeals court ruled that Hudson had not heard enough evidence to make such a ruling.
The case was tried by then Assistant District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was later disbarred and held in contempt for his actions in the Duke Lacrosse case.
“You always have to have faith”, Howard said.
Howard, 54, was discharged from custody on Wednesday without condition after serving 21 years in prison.
Defense attorney Barry Scheck said he thought it was unlikely that prosecutors would retry Howard because of the contradictory evidence offered by witnesses at his original trial, signs of misconduct by prosecutors and police and lack of physical evidence.
He also said he was not angry. Nifong was disbarred from practice and jailed for his handling of another trial, the Duke University lacrosse case.
Howard’s attorney claimed the jury at the time did not know about evidence that implicated another man. A Durham police detective testified at Howard’s trial that investigators never considered that the sexual assaults were linked to the killers.
They argued that despite what police and prosecutors presented to the jury in 1995 that Washington and her daughter had been sexually assaulted and murdered before someone set fire to their apartment. He was identified from DNA samples stored in a federal database, which was collected after Jones was sentenced to prison in Tennessee.
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Jones on Tuesday refused to answer questions from Howard’s attorneys, citing his constitutional right against incriminating himself.
