Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 6, 1994 TAG: 9411070052
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SARAH HUNTLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Honaker's defense attorney provided witnesses who said Honaker was in Roanoke at the time of the attack. Tests showed that Honaker's fingerprints did not match prints lifted from the crime scene. Honaker himself testified that he was unable to produce sperm because of a vasectomy in 1977.
Nevertheless, the commonwealth's case seemed damning, the jurors said. Both the victim and her then-boyfriend gave powerful eyewitness testimony about the June 22, 1984, attack, which occurred as the couple camped out in their car on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Without hesitation, they identified Honaker as the rapist.
"You have to understand that the witnesses were very, very credible," Henry Conner, a juror and then-school superintendent, said last week. "There wasn't any question in my mind."
Hazel Hight, another juror, also remembered feeling certain. "Based on the evidence we had, we all agreed that he was guilty," she said.
They were 12 people: a typist, a telephone equipment engineer, a truck driver, a grinder, a school superintendent, a college student, a housewife, a housekeeper, a painter, a school custodian, a retiree and a self-employed man.
Sixteen days ago, nearly 10 years into the sentence,
Gov. George Allen pardoned the convicted rapist, and Honaker walked away from prison - an innocent man. The governor's long-awaited decision followed a series of DNA tests that were unavailable in 1985. The genetic tests, performed on semen taken from the victim, ruled out Honaker.
Honaker's supporters had criticized Allen for failing to pardon Honaker immediately after the first set of test results. But Ken Farrar, Honaker's defense attorney in the 1985 trial, said the scrutiny the governor gave to the tests reinforces Honaker's innocence.
"I don't know, but I would assume the governor looked at the new evidence the way an appeals court would - in the light most favorable to the commonwealth," Farrar said. "For him to conclude that Eddie was innocent, after taking that kind of an approach, the finding must have been definite."
Jury foreman Roy Bivens made a similar argument. "If the governor liked the new evidence enough to pardon him, then it must be right, because Governor Allen's against parole," said Bivens, who was a telephone equipment engineer in 1985.
The jurors who sent Honaker to prison know how difficult the governor's decision was.
"He took about four months to investigate the new evidence, to test and retest," Conner said. "I have a great deal of confidence in the judicial judgement of
Governor Allen, so all I can say is `so be it.'''
They also acknowledged that the DNA evidence, had it been admissible, might have swayed their original verdict, but they are still troubled by contradictory feelings.
"If he's innocent, I don't want to see him serving time," said Hight, who was a housewife in 1985, "but we really thought he was guilty."
Juror Ray Ramsey returned to the victim's testimony, as he explained his reaction to the pardon.
"I guess the DNA test proves he was innocent," said Ramsey, who was self-employed during the case. "But I listened to the girl at the trial. She had stayed with him for hours during the rape. I thought she would know. She was absolutely and positively certain that he raped her. In fact, to be honest, if the trial was today, I'd probably vote the way I did the first time around."
To Honaker, who spent more than nine years confined to a cell, the justice system doesn't seem just. And for at least one juror, serving on the jury that sent Honaker to prison is a source of shame.
"I feel badly that I served on a jury that might have imprisoned a man wrongly," Ramsey said. "It makes me think maybe I shouldn't be a part of a jury again. I hope this mistake doesn't happen again."
But some of the trial's participants said the law and its institutions worked as they should.
"At first blush, it seems like Eddie was the victim of a flawed system, but from a purely theoretical point of view, that isn't true," Farrar said. "He was tried and convicted based on evidence that was available then. While he was serving his time, new evidence came on to the scene, and the system allowed it to be looked at again. That's how it should be.
"None of that is going to make Eddie feel any better. It is an awful thing, and nothing that anyone can say or do can undo what happened to him, but there you have it."
Juror Conner said, "I don't feel that the justice system betrayed [Honaker]. If he indeed is innocent, we should all be very, very happy that the justice system worked to correct an injustice."
by CNB