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The YLD: Brewing For the Greater Good To Benefit the NCBF

By Eleanor Redhage

The NCBA YLD is pleased to announce Brewing for the Greater Good, a new series of events to benefit the North Carolina Bar Foundation. This bar year, the YLD and NCBF are partnering to host events across North Carolina from the mountains to the coast. These events are an opportunity to bring together area YLD and NCBA members – their family and friends – at local breweries for fun, fellowship and philanthropy.

 

Brewing for the Greater Good in Raleigh
Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2019
5:30 – 8:00 p.m.
Trophy Brewing Co. Tap & Table
225 S. Wilmington St, Raleigh, NC 27601
Check in on the NCBF Facebook page.

The YLD has long been the volunteer force behind the Foundation’s pro bono and public service programs. The NC Bar Foundation would like to thank the YLD for its ongoing support and share how the outreach of the YLD is impacting the people and communities of North Carolina. While Brewing for the Greater Good in Raleigh, we would like to spotlight how the legal profession, collectively, can bolster the Foundation’s impact. There is great work happening – and more to be done.

Take time out of your day to relax and unwind with the YLD: Brewing for the Greater Good to benefit the NCBF.

YLD: Brewing for the Greater Good to benefit the NCBF will be on tap in a city near you. Please look for more information regarding events in Asheville, Charlotte and Greensboro.

November E-Blast: Construction Law For YLD, Legal Feeding Frenzy, Law Student Outreach and More

DATES TO KNOW

November 15, 2018 | Insurance Law Networking |Charlotte| 5:30 pm

November 15, 2018 | Member Social | Greenville| 5:30 pm -7:00 pm

November 19, 2018 | Sports & Entertainment Law Charlotte Hornets Networking | Charlotte| TBA

November 20, 2018 | YLD Brewing For the Greater Good | Wilmington | 5:30 pm

November 29, 2018 | Family Law Section Reception | Winston-Salem | 5:30 pm

December 1, 2018 | Young Lawyers Division Council Meeting | 9:00 am

December 1, 2018 | Young Lawyers Division Escape Room Networking Event | Greensboro | 2:00 pm

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To My Dearest Florence:

By Angela Doughty

The ravaging of my beautiful hometown of New Bern and the decimation of so many wonderful homes and families has broken my heart and irreversibly altered my soul.  The images, videos, and stories cannot do justice to the devastation experienced by those hit hardest. There are not words to express the feelings swirling deep in my heart about the wake of destruction left behind in our communities.

Yet, I am one of the lucky ones.  My loved ones are safe.  My home is habitable with relatively minimal damage. I am left, however, with a feeling of helplessness, of survivor’s guilt, of the desire to assist with more than care packages and donations.

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The UNC Cancer Pro Bono Legal Project Needs You!

If you have already volunteered as a supervising attorney with the UNC School of Law’s Cancer Project, you know how meaningful advance directive documents can be in bringing peace of mind to individuals facing daunting and difficult medical situations. If you have not had the chance to volunteer in this role, you are invited to participate now!

To learn more about this program, and about the substantive law which it provides, please register to attend the UNC Cancer Pro Bono Legal Project CLE, to be held at the UNC School of Law on January 26 at 9 a.m. This CLE will provide an overview of substantive law helpful to attorneys participating in the UNC Cancer Pro Bono Legal Project, a collaborative project sponsored by the UNC School of Law’s Pro Bono Program, N.C. Cancer Hospital, and Legal Aid of North Carolina. The CLE also will include a review of changes to the law surrounding advance directives documents, new for 2018.

While this CLE is provided free of charge — in hopes that you will volunteer (or continue to volunteer!) as a supervising attorney through the program — you will be responsible for paying your own CLE fee to the state bar ($3.50/hour).

Click here to register for the CLE program.

 

 

The Fantastic Five: Randolph Co. Attorneys Unite To Fight Legal Aid Budget Cuts

Editor’s note: As we #celebrateprobono this week, we take a look at one group of lawyers’ innovative approach to helping their community.

By Nihad Mansour

When Thomas Robins heard about a $1.5 million cut to the budget for Legal Aid of North Carolina in 2015, he realized LANC would no longer be able to send an attorney to Randolph County to represent victims of domestic violence.

Without hesitation, Robins, a partner at Bunch, Robins & Stubblefield in Asheboro, assembled a team of attorneys — Sarah Lanier, Jennifer Bennett, Margaret Megerian and Brooke Schmidly — to not only temporarily fill this gap, but to ensure a long-term commitment to addressing the unmet legal need of domestic violence victims in Randolph County. Robins developed a weekly on-call rotation system for his team of attorneys to represent victims of domestic violence in Randolph County in domestic violence hearings.

Since spring of 2016, the group has collectively represented 114 victims of domestic violence in Randolph County.

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Pro Bono Week: Celebrate Giving Back, Become Part Of the N.C. Pro Bono Honor Society

By Sylvia Novinsky

Lawyers, you have another reason to smile this week.

It’s National Celebration of Pro Bono Week, an annual initiative spearheaded by the ABA Standing Committee on Public Service to enhance and expand efforts to increase access to justice for all. The #celebrateprobono effort gives legal communities around the country an opportunity to recognize the good legal volunteer work being done. In North Carolina, we have much to celebrate in this regard.

In January 2017, the N.C. Pro Bono Resource Center established North Carolina’s first statewide voluntary reporting process. This process allows attorneys to report information about their pro bono legal service in 2016. What we heard through that process was encouraging: Attorneys reported more than 25,000 hours of pro bono legal service provided last year. Further, 89.3 percent of respondents reported providing some legal volunteerism, and 20 percent of respondents engaged in all the types of activity included in the rule: pro bono legal service, law improvement activity, non-legal community service, and financial contributions to support civil legal aid.

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From the Outgoing Chair: A Heartfelt Thanks For a Year Of Giving and Growing

By Annette Phelps

It seems like it was only a month ago when I submitted my first blog as your Paralegal Division Chair.  It has been a great year for the division with a lot of new and exciting changes, challenges, and proud moments.

The year started off with my focus on how to change the internal structure of the Paralegal Division to be completely in touch with what all the sections and other divisions are involved with and how to disseminate all that information to the council and members.  A new Section Liaison Committee Chair was appointed to breathe life back into a committee that was struggling for participation.  All section liaisons are now invited to participate in all council meetings so that they have a first-hand experience of everything our division is doing.  They can then report back to each section and division for which they are a liaison, and report back to our division what opportunities are available by way of pro bono work, technology, education, and many opportunities. There are still section liaisons spots available and we welcome anyone interested in joining a section and becoming a liaison to contact us.  The networking that comes from being a section liaison is priceless.

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Why Report? The Importance Of Sharing Your Pro Bono Engagement

As attorneys, we are tasked with the great and noble responsibility of defending the rule of law – case by case, client by client. While our system is not perfect, the law’s ability to right wrongs, to reconcile conflicts, and to resolve disputes peacefully is a measure of who we are as a people, and the rest of the world looks to our courts as the exemplar of fair and impartial administration of justice.

Nevertheless, this fairness and impartiality only truly exist when they are available to all members of our state, regardless of ability to pay. A failure to provide adequate legal services to those of modest means affects both the economic and social fabric of our society, and does not adequately represent the principles of the profession to which we have been called. It is our duty to fill the gap that exists between this challenging reality and the highest ideal of our profession – equal justice under law for all people.

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After Years Of Wrongful Imprisonment, Darryl Howard Was Sustained By Love, Redeemed By Justice

By Amber Nimocks

Darryl and Nannie Howard banter gently, laughing and smiling a bit like newlyweds, a bit like the long-married couple they are. Their ease and happiness with each other seem to belie the 24 years of physical separation they have endured.

Until late this summer, Howard was imprisoned, serving time for crimes he insisted he was innocent of from the start. He walked out of a Durham courtroom on Aug. 31 after Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson vacated guilty verdicts against him in a 1991 double murder. The decision came after Howard’s attorneys presented the judge with DNA evidence that had not been presented to the jury that heard Howard’s case. The evidence excluded Howard from the murders of Doris Washington and her 13-year-old daughter Nishonda and linked two others to the crime scene. The Durham District Attorney’s Office did not appeal the ruling.

Howard credits his faith and his wife’s support for helping him hold onto hope through years of unjust incarceration.

“It was a lot of faith in God, and the knowledge that I knew one day – I think anybody in my situation would know – I didn’t do it and I’m going to get out one day – and Nannie,” he said. “She helped me with every single thing I went through … She came to see me every week. She based all her decisions in her life around me being out one day, around us being out one day and she stayed with me and helped me out.”

While her husband was imprisoned, Nannie kept their troubles largely to herself. She helped him petition attorneys for help. She drove to see him every week, trekking all over the state. She talked with him by phone several times each day. And 18 years ago they were married while he was behind bars. But none of her colleagues at the North Carolina Bar Center, where she worked on contract for Xerox for about a dozen years, knew about her husband until they saw it on the news. She said she was secretive because she didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her and she didn’t want the drama.

“That would be the topic every single day, and it would become such a big issue that, you know,   I could see people walking around me whispering ‘That’s the one whose husband is in prison’ and I just didn’t want that,” she said. “I just wanted everyone to say ‘Hey, Nannie,’ and just go on with the day. I came in with a smile and I did my job I didn’t want that burden of ‘Oh my God, how are you feeling today? I didn’t want that pity.”

Like her husband, she credits her faith and their relationship for sustaining her.

“We talked a lot,” she said. “He would have a struggle or be upset about something and we would be on the phone sometimes three and four times a day just talking about random stuff. We talked about it – anything that had him upset, we talked through it because I didn’t want him to overreact and get into trouble while he was in prison. And if we had a conflict with each other we made a point of never going to bed or saying good night to each other angry. So, we had to make up or before we fell asleep or before the phone was cut off, which was like 8 or 9 o’clock.”

‘No better feeling’

Nannie wasn’t Howard’s only connection to the NCBA. One member of the legal team that helped win his freedom was Womble Carlyle attorney Jim Cooney, an NCBA member and past recipient of the NCBA’s William Thorp Pro Bono Award and the Wade M. Smith Award for criminal defense.

Cooney got involved in the case after Innocence Project founder Barry Scheck agreed to take it on. He and Scheck had worked together on the Duke Lacrosse defense and before. The result of the Howard case stands out, even in a career as a remarkable as Cooney’s.

“When a judge lets someone go in a case like this, like he did with Darryl, particularly saying he was innocent – that’s happened to me before, and for a lawyer, well, there’s no better feeling,” he said.

Cooney said fresh DNA evidence was key to the case.

“The DNA testing we were able to do was very different than what was done in 1991,” he said.

Once that evidence was in play, Cooney said, “It cascaded in a way that none of us had anticipated.”

The victims in the case were found naked and dead in their home in a Durham housing complex. Both had been beaten, and the daughter, Nishonda, had been strangled. Testing done at the time of the investigation found semen in Nishonda, and that semen could not be linked to Darryl Howard, Cooney said.

Prosecutors, including then Assistant District Attorney Mike Nifong, argued that Nishonda had engaged in consensual sex with her boyfriend and that rape had nothing to do with the murder. When Innocence Team investigators renewed an examination of the evidence, they found semen in the mother, Doris, which earlier investigators had not been able to find. That semen could not be linked to Howard either, Cooney said.

“Now we had two different semen samples from two different men, neither of whom were Darryl, one of whom is a convicted felon,” Cooney said. “There’s no trace of physical evidence [against Darryl], and you cannot have killed these women in this way without leaving some form of DNA.”

When investigators ran the DNA through a federal database of criminals’ DNA records, they got a cold hit on a felon named Jermeck Jones, who had been imprisoned in Tennessee. Jones had been living a couple of blocks from the victims at the time of the crime.

Durham police brought Jones in to get a confirmatory DNA and for interrogation in 2012. During the course of that interrogation, while he was left alone, Jones was recorded on videotape making a call, telling whomever was on the other line that he wasn’t going to be a rat, and that he needed a lawyer.

Howard’s legal team did not see the tape of that call until July of this year, Cooney said. When Jermeck Jones was called to testify in front of Judge Hudson, he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights.

But, Cooney said, Durham police knew more during the original investigation than they had shared with Howard’s defense team. Initial media reports of the crime included no mention of the victims having been raped. But prosecutors received a tip from an informant in 1993 who said he or she knew the victims were raped and murdered.

“That informant’s tip was never produced,” Cooney said. “They argued that there was no rape.  The police officer who got the tip said he never suspected this was a sex offense.”

Howard’s case points to the power of DNA testing, Cooney said, and it demonstrates the importance of open-file discovery and the videotaping of interrogations.

It also demonstrates how important pro bono work is. Cooney estimated that Womble Carlyle dedicated several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of resources to the Howard case.

Inspired By Belief

For Darryl and Nannie Howard, Cooney and the Innocence Project lawyers who worked on his case, Scheck, Seema Saifee and others, became like family.

“I love them people, I really do,” Darryl Howard said.

He said their belief in his innocence inspired him. Howard recalls a moment in court when Cooney was asked to recall a detail about the case that Howard himself could not remember. His attorney answered without missing a beat.

“He stood right up and gave them an answer like he knew it,” Howard said. “I couldn’t believe he even knew that. I said ‘Mr. Cooney, how could you know that?’ He just stopped me and looked in my face and said ‘Because I care about you.’ It almost made me cry.”

Howard said still believes in the justice system even though he has first-hand experience with its flaws. Checks on prosecutorial power would help, he said.

“Every day we’re finding out there’s more people in prison for something they didn’t do,” Howard said. “More and more and more and more …  I think it’s happening a lot more than we realize. And the reason why it’s happening is because the people that do it, nothing can be done to them.”

He would also advocate for more of an emphasis on helping prisoners prepare for a life after incarceration.

“Guys are in prison so long they lose everything around them and when they get out the state’s got to take care of them again,” Howard said. “They have to worry about them again. That’s an extra burden. … Prisons don’t rehabilitate. They give you a TV and they give you a chair and say ‘Go sit down over there.’ It’s an industry.”

But Howard says he’s not angry. He and Nannie celebrated their 18th anniversary – their first in freedom – in September. They have a lot of lost time to make up for, and it’s clear from the way they smile at each other that they aren’t wasting any of it.

Donations to Darryl Howard can be made via his Razoo fund-raising page: https://www.razoo.com/us/story/Darrylhoward

 

The Chair’s Comments: Make the Year Even Better By Getting Involved

bryant-joshBy Joshua D. Bryant

Fellow Tax Section Members:

As I write this, the inaugural post for our section’s blog, much of eastern North Carolina is beginning the long process of recovering from the heavy rains brought by Hurricane Matthew. Early maps depicting alternate possible paths for the storm reflected the uncertainty that is characteristic of hurricanes—lines of various colors veering in different directions with only a slightly discernible pattern. Uncertainty has been a theme in 2016 in many respects, including economically and, with the November elections looming, politically.

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