From [HERE] and [HERE] Nearly a year has passed since Darryl Anthony Howard heard a Durham County judge overturn guilty verdicts for two homicides Howard maintains he did not commit. [In photo, N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper]. 

But the 53-year-old Black man was still in prison as attorneys argued for and against the decision in front of a three-judge Court of Appeals panel last Wednesday.

Last May, Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson ruled that Howard’s conviction should be overturned due to a lack of physical evidence tying him to the double-murder for which he is serving an 80-year sentence. Judge Hudson also issued an order setting bail so that Howard could be released pending retrial. However, state prosecutors immediately appealed both rulings.

Assistant Attorney General Mary Carla Babb told the appeals court judges – Ann Marie Calabria, Donna Stroud and John Tyson – that state prosecutors believed Judge Orlando Hudson erred in May when he ordered a new trial for Howard.

Howard was convicted in 1995 of two counts of second-degree murder for the homicides of Doris Washington, 29, and her 13-year-old daughter, Nishonda, at a Durham public housing complex.

The killings occurred in 1991 in what investigators described as drug-related crimes.

Howard was convicted based on conflicting witness testimony which claimed that Howard was seen arguing with one of the victims the day before the crime occurred. One witness later recanted, stating he was coerced into implicating Howard. Another was paid $10,000 from a state compensation fund for her testimony.

During the investigation, DNA testing of sperm found on one of the victims’ bodies excluded Howard as the source. But the prosecution proceeded with its case against Howard, convincing the jury instead that no sexual assaults took place.

The Innocence Project conducted more testing last year on the two victims’ rape kits. DNA from one of the kits matched to a career criminal with over 35 prior convictions, and excluded Howard. Testing on the other kit revealed a second male profile that also excluded Howard.

Charlotte attorney Jim Cooney, working in collaboration with the Innocence Project, a national organization dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted through DNA testing, told the three appeals court judges on Wednesday that new DNA evidence and statements collected by post-conviction investigators implicated another man in the crime.

Cooney also argued that a police document uncovered by Innocence Project researchers in the past decade raised questions about the actions of Durham prosecutors, who pushed ahead with the case against Howard knowing that DNA pointed to other culprits.

Sperm was found on the teen and collected in an investigative rape kit. An autopsy showed that her mother had been sexually assaulted, according to court documents. Howard was charged in the homicides, but DNA tests excluded him as a match to the sexual assault evidence.

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.

Mike Nifong, the former Durham District Attorney disbarred for his misconduct in the Duke lacrosse case, was an assistant district attorney and the prosecutor at trial.