A 49-year-old man who has served more than 14 years of a life sentence for raping two teenage sisters will be released today after DNA tests determined that he wasn't the attacker.
Joseph Lamont Abbitt of Winston-Salem was convicted on June 22, 1995, of two counts of first-degree rape, one count of first-degree burglary and two counts of first-degree kidnapping in connection with the 1991 sexual assaults of a 15-year-old girl and her 13-year-old sister.
A joint motion to vacate the convictions against Abbitt filed by the Forsyth County District Attorney's Office and the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence is scheduled to be heard at noon today by Judge A. Moses Massey in Forsyth Superior Court.
"I'm very pleased for him," said Nancy Wooten, Abbitt's original defense attorney. "I'm surprised. The evidence was strong against him."
The decision to file the motion to set aside the convictions came quickly after DNA evidence collected in the case was retested by the State Bureau of Investigation and LabCorp of Research Triangle Park. The genetic profile the scientists generated "conclusively eliminated the defendant as the offender."
Christine Mumma, the executive director of the innocence center, said yesterday that Abbitt's case once again shows the unreliability of eye-witness identifications.
In 75 percent of the cases in which people were exonerated by DNA evidence, misidentification was a major factor, Mumma said.
"This is another unfortunate misidentification case," she said. "Nobody's at fault."
The conviction
The attacks occurred May 2, 1991. About 5:30 a.m. that day, the sisters were getting ready for school when an intruder entered their house on Fairchild Road in eastern Winston-Salem. According to a summary of the case obtained yesterday by the Winston-Salem Journal, their mother had spent the night at a boyfriend's and the girls were left unattended.
The intruder raped both girls at knifepoint and bound their feet and hands. The attacker stayed in the house for about 1½ hours and searched for money before leaving. The girls told investigators that they believed that their attacker was a man named Joseph who had lived two doors away.
Once police confirmed that Abbitt had lived nearby, they zeroed in on him as a suspect. The girls picked him out in separate photographic lineups, and police collected physical evidence, including rape kits, bedding and clothing from the crime scene.
Before investigators could arrest Abbitt, he left the state. They found him in May 1994 in Texas, where he had been serving time for unrelated crimes.
While Abbitt was missing, the State Bureau of Investigation completed its testing of the physical evidence. Because of the limitations of DNA science at the time, a conclusive genetic profile of the rapist could not be created.
The trial started June 19, 1995. Both victims identified Abbitt as their attacker. He did not testify but said that he had been working that morning as a painter -- a fact that could not be confirmed by his employer.
A jury convicted Abbitt on all counts and Judge Todd Burke of Forsyth Superior Court sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences, plus 50 years. The N.C. Court of Appeals upheld the convictions in May 1996.
What lies ahead
After the 2004 exoneration of Darryl Hunt -- who was convicted on murder spent nearly 19 years in prison before DNA evidence proved that another man was the killer -- Abbitt contacted the innocence center, where an in-house investigation in 2008 determined that he might have a legitimate claim.
A consent order signed Nov. 5, 2008, allowed DNA testing of any remaining evidence.
A lot of it had been destroyed -- state law did not require it to be saved at the time of Abbitt's conviction -- but the Winston-Salem Police Department kept some items, including rape kits returned by the SBI in 1994.
That round of testing was inconclusive, but another series of tests conducted by LabCorp after a second consent order signed July 7 excluded Abbitt.
When those results were confirmed in the past week, the motion to vacate the convictions was prepared.
Mumma, of the innocence center, said that the district attorney's office and the SBI were cooperative throughout the investigation of the case.
"And that's the way it should be in these cases," she said.
Mumma said that once Abbitt is exonerated, he can apply for a pardon from Gov. Bev Perdue.
And he is also eligible for $700,000 compensation from the state -- $50,000 a year for every year he was wrongly imprisoned.
By Michael Hewlett
No comments:
Post a Comment