He Was Wrongly Convicted Of Murder And Awarded $6 Million For Civil Rights Violations. The Government Refuses To Pay.

Darryl Howard was wrongly convicted of murder in 1995 and spent 24 years in prison before he was finally exonerated. Naturally, he sued, and a jury awarded him $6 million in damages due to the misconduct of then-detective Darrell Dowdy, who “fabricated evidence and performed an inadequate investigation” that led to Howard’s wrongful conviction, The News & Observer reported.

But the city of Durham, North Carolina, is refusing to pay Howard, and to add insult to injury, they also plan to ask Howard “to pay the legal fees of two city employees who were dismissed from the lawsuit,” the outlet added.

City Attorney Kimberly Rehberg insisted that the jury’s determination in the case resulted in a “bad faith finding” against Dowdy, and that, unless the city has evidence to show otherwise, “the city generally proceeds under the presumption that, however conduct may have been portrayed in a complaint, the employee was engaged in the good faith execution of their duties on behalf of the city and was, thus, entitled to a defense.”

Thus, the Durham City Council is refusing to pay the judgment and award Howard the money he is owed. Even though the city council now refuses to pay the $6 million a jury determined it owes Howard, it spent $4 million on litigation against him.

On April 30, 2021, Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) granted Howard a pardon of innocence, which made him eligible for state compensation.

“I proved my innocence. I went through every court,” Howard told the Observer. “Every judge says what this was, even the governor.”

“I don’t understand that,” he said. “Now I have to fight again.”

The crimes for which Howard was wrongly convicted took place on November 27, 1991, when a fire broke out at a public housing apartment building in Durham. When the flames were extinguished, the nude bodies of two women – Doris Washington, 29, and her daughter Nishonda, 13 – were discovered.

“An autopsy revealed that Nishonda had died of ligature strangulation and Doris, who also had ligature marks on her neck, died of blunt force trauma. Both appeared to have been sexually assaulted,” the University of Michigan’s National Registry of Exonerations reported.

Police were alerted to Howard early on in the case, since he was friends with Washington. In 1992, a prostitute named Angela Oliver implicated Howard in the murders, but her statement was not corroborated by anyone else. Oliver gave a taped statement over 46 minutes, but police stopped and started the recorder often – to the point the recording was only 10 minutes long. Oliver claimed Howard went to Washington’s apartment the night she was murdered to get money or drugs and had previously threatened to kill Washington if she didn’t have that money or the drugs, Oliver wasn’t clear.

“[Oliver] also said that late in the evening, she and Howard returned to the apartment with Howard’s brother, Harvey, and that Howard drew a gun and hit Doris in the face with it. Howard took Doris into the apartment and, Oliver said, she heard Doris screaming,” the Registry reported. “When the screaming ended, Howard called Harvey into the apartment and said he had to ‘burn them up.’ Oliver said she went to the car and later the three of them drove to a drug house to get high.”

On the witness stand, Oliver recanted her statement and claimed the lead detective in the case threatened to charge her with accessory to murder if she didn’t testify against Howard. She claimed the recording kept getting stopped during her statement because she “wasn’t talking right or something.”

The detective conceded that he had threatened to charge Oliver if she didn’t cooperate. The detective also admitted to making a fake warrant for murder and arson that he showed to Natasha Mayo, Howard’s girlfriend, that had her name on it in an attempt to get her to implicate Howard. She didn’t.

Howard was charged in 1992 for the crimes.

DNA found in a rape kit taken from Nishonda did not belong to Howard, but then Durham County assistant district attorney Michael Nifong (of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax infamy) argued that 13-year-old Nishonda had consensual sex with her boyfriend before the murders, even though there was no evidence of this and no boyfriend was named.

“Several prosecution witnesses testified to seeing Howard near Doris’s apartment in the hours prior to the murders, although their accounts were contradictory and inconsistent,” the Registry reported. One of those witnesses received $10,000 in exchange for her testimony, another was a convicted felon.

Howard was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to 80 years in prison. In 2009, the Innocence Project, which started representing Howard by that time, requested DNA testing of Doris’ rape kit that matched a man named Jermeck Jones, a career criminal. DNA testing of Nishonda’s rape kit found a second DNA profile that belonged to neither Jones nor Howard.

Jones was not investigated.

“After moving for post-conviction DNA testing, Howard’s attorneys discovered undisclosed documents in the prosecution files that revealed that a few days after the murders, Durham police received a tip from an informant that the two victims were killed because Doris owed $8,000 to drug dealers from New York or Philadelphia. The informant said that residents of the housing complex had been offered $2,000 a week for use of their apartments to sell narcotics and that Doris had accepted. The tipster said that when the perpetrators came for the money they raped Doris before strangling her. The tipster said that Doris was murdered because the drug dealers learned that drugs were missing and Doris did not repay the $8,000 that was owed; her daughter was killed because she walked in during the crime. The informant also said that more than one perpetrator was involved,” the Registry reported.

The tip was ignored and concealed by Durham police and Nifong.

Howard’s convictions were vacated in May 2014, but the prosecution appealed and won in April 2016. Two months later, in August 2016, Howard’s convictions were again vacated and a new trial was ordered. Howard was released on bond.

On September 2, 2016, the charges against Howard were dismissed.

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