
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, August 23, 1994                   TAG: 9408250079
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HONAKER CASE

THE JUNE 24, 1984, rape of a 19-year-old Newport News woman, at a Blue Ridge Parkway overlook in Nelson County, was a vicious crime. It warranted the three life sentences plus 24 years to which Edward Honaker was sentenced.

Except for one thing.

Honaker didn't do it. Honaker knows it. Forensic experts know it. The Nelson County prosecutor knows it; he has joined Honaker's attorneys in petitioning Gov. George Allen for Honaker's release after a decade in custody for a crime he didn't commit.

But the supposedly anti-crime governor has fiddled around for two months with Honaker's clemency request, prolonging what in effect has become a state-sponsored kidnapping.

And when the wrong person is convicted of a crime, of course, it means the real perpetrator has escaped punishment for it.

The evidence on which Honaker was initially convicted seems in retrospect less than convincing. As initially described, the attacker was a 6-foot-4-inch left-handed man. Honaker is 5-feet-11 and right-handed. Fingerprints on the car in which the young woman and her boyfriend were traveling didn't match Honaker's. Honaker had had a vasectomy several years earlier; semen from the rape contained sperm. On the other hand, the victim and her boyfriend identified him; a pubic hair found at the scene was said to match his, a claim that experts now say is erroneous.

All that, however, is moot. Modern DNA testing, not available at the time of Honaker's 1985 trial, conclusively rules him out as the rapist. That is the finding of the California lab that performed the test for Honaker; it is the finding of the state's forensics experts here in Virginia.

So why is Honaker still in prison?

Do the governor and his aides know something known by no one else? If so, it should be made public, for it is hard to imagine what might justify prolonging an innocent man's imprisonment.

Or are Allen and his aides too preoccupied with looking tough on violent crime to assign anything but a low priority to a clemency request no matter how overwhelming the evidence of the petitioner's innocence?

If the latter, Honaker must be considered a political prisoner. Either way, his situation should be rectified immediately.

by CNB