Joseph Lamont Abbitt is a free man. About 2:30 this afternoon, Abbitt walked out of the Forsyth County Jail, surrounded by family members, after a judge set aside his conviction.
At a hearing in Forsyth Superior Court Judge A. Moses Massey vacated the life sentence that Abbitt had been serving for raping two teenage sisters after DNA evidence determined that he was not the attacker.
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 16-year-old girl and her 13-year-old sister.
Outside the jail today, Abbitt said he hoped the DNA evidence would "reveal the perpetrator who really did this to those two young girls.
"I do not blame them for nothing that happened to me, and I still pray for them every day," Abbitt said.
The Forsyth County District Attorney's Office and the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence filed a motion to vacate the convictions against Abbitt 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."
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. The mother had spent the night at a boyfriend's and the girls were left unattended, according to a summary of the case.
The intruder raped both girls at knife point and bound their feet and hands. The attacker stayed in the house for about 1 1/2 hours and searched for money before leaving. The girls told investigators that they believed that their attacker was a man named Joseph who 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. While he 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.
Abbitt was found in May 1994 in Texas, where he was serving time on unrelated crimes. A jury convicted him in 1995, 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.
In 2005, 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.
"It is great," said Darryl Hunt, who was cleared by DNA evidence after nearly 19 years on a murder conviction. "We are starting to see the real results of the justice system coming to grips with the reality that there are a lot of innocent people still in prison."
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