Years in prison -- but is he a killer?

The thinking must have been, no sense beating around the bush. Here is the opening sentence of a legal document to which I. Beverly Lake Jr., retired chief justice of North Carolina's Supreme Court, affixed his name:

"Lee Wayne Hunt has been imprisoned for over twenty years for crimes he did not commit."

But if Lake thought his seal of approval would help spur his former colleagues to review Hunt's case, then he was in for a rude surprise. No dice, the court ruled, turning back the request filed on Hunt's behalf. As is the custom, there was no explanation. So what gives?

On one side, there was the irresistible force -- an eloquent, passionate plea for justice submitted by two UNC-Chapel Hill law professors and Lake, arguing that Hunt is serving life sentences for two murders actually committed by someone else.

But that force struck an immovable object. The state mustered a stout response that systematically countered Hunt's rationale for Supreme Court intervention. So unless he succeeds with an appeal on the federal level, Lee Wayne Hunt, 48, is likely to remain right where he is. He's now biding his time at Johnston Correctional Institution and telling anyone who asks that no, he's not a killer. Believe it or not.

"I never told nobody that I was an angel, that I didn't do this and I didn't do that," Hunt told a reporter for The Washington Post in a story carried last fall by The N&O. "What I've said from the word get-go is that I ain't never killed nobody."

The Post caught up with Hunt as part of an investigation conducted with "60 Minutes" into a forensic technique known as lead-batching, long used to match bullets from crime scenes to weapons and their owners. But the National Academy of Sciences concluded that evidence of lead similarities was too dubious in significance to be useful in court. Still, the FBI was slow to notify defendants in whose trials such evidence had figured.

That included Hunt. An FBI agent testified at his 1986 trial in Fayetteville, linking a box of bullets that had been in the possession of Hunt's co-defendant to slugs recovered from the bodies of murder victims Roland and Lisa Matthews. They died from gunshot wounds to their heads and slit throats in their Cumberland County home one night in March 1984. Their toddler daughter was left an orphan.

In their application to the Supreme Court as counsel for Hunt, Professors Richard A. Rosen and Kenneth S. Broun, together with Lake, asserted that the state relied on the FBI agent's "scientific expertise to link Mr. Hunt to the crime. Science now tells us that [the agent's] expert evidence was worthless." Hunt's conviction should therefore be tossed, they concluded.

Nor was that the only ace they were holding, or thought they were holding. The lawyer who represented co-defendant Jerry Cashwell had come forward to say that Cashwell admitted all along to having killed the couple himself.

The lawyer, Staples Hughes, said he decided to divulge that little detail because he was bothered by Hunt's conviction -- and also because Cashwell was no longer around to worry about it. Cashwell, you see, is dead. In 2002, he killed himself in prison. The State Bar investigated Hughes for breaching a confidence. But it cleared him -- mindful of a Supreme Court ruling authored by Bev Lake.

A Republican and a conservative, Lake is no mollycoddler of criminals. Yet he is in the forefront of North Carolina's push to identify people who in fact did not commit the crimes for which they were convicted.

A handful of "exonerees" have indeed made headlines. Should Lee Wayne Hunt be included among them? Clearly, the Supreme Court didn't find the case for him to be so compelling as to overturn years' worth of trial and appellate findings. In other words, the state -- in a lengthy motion to dismiss filed by Steven M. Arbogast, special deputy attorney general -- battled the pro-Hunt team at least to a draw.

Prosecutors' theory all along was that Hunt, ringleader of some dope dealers, instigated the murders because he thought the victims had stolen marijuana from him. The prosecution didn't claim that Hunt was the triggerman -- that was Cashwell -- just that Hunt was present and culpable. Hunt's defenders, in wild contrast, say that Cashwell butchered the Matthewses in a dispute over the volume of the TV they were watching, with Hunt nowhere around.

The Supreme Court, even in the post-Lake era, is a conservative outfit. There's no telling how its members lined up on the issue (only that Justice Ed Brady of Fayetteville recused himself). But given the imponderables of such a tangled episode, made even murkier by the passage of time, it perhaps should come as no surprise that the court turned Hunt down.

If he killed no one after all, he has become another victim of this terrible episode -- but at least, with no death penalty in the works, he can keep on fighting.