A DETOUR: SOMETIMES JUSTICE TAKES A CURVY ROAD

Defense attorneys hear it all the time. "Someone planted those drugs,
honest. I didn't do it."

So it's no surprise that Darick Owens, a 34-year-old welder, had a tough
time convincing his attorney that the pound of marijuana and the 10 tablets
of Ecstasy found in his 1989 Chevy weren't his.

"Like everyone else, he didn't believe me," Owens said.

Owens was living with his sister in southern Davidson County in September
2000. One Saturday some deputies came to the house looking for a stash of
drugs. They said they had received a tip from CrimeStoppers. So Owens said
he handed over two joints.

The next day the deputies came back. Owens was at his girlfriend's this
time. They searched his car and found a bag of marijuana and the pills
under the driver's seat.

A plea of no contest

Owens said he suspected all along that he was being set up in retaliation
for a domestic dispute. But he couldn't prove it. So after 50 days in jail,
he struck a deal. He agreed to plead no contest to the drug charges, which
means that he didn't admit guilt but still got punished: two years of
supervised probation, with six months of curfews and 50 hours of community
service.

It was probably the best he could do.

"Everyone of us has represented people who tell us they didn't do it," said
James McMillan, a Thomasville lawyer not involved in this case. "Sometimes
you just don't know. Sometimes the odds against them in court are just so
great and the inherent credibility of law-enforcement officers is just so
great that it's tough. I don't think anyone could fault the guy for taking
the plea or fault his lawyer."

It turns out that Owens was telling the truth.

The drugs were planted. And whoever did it had some help in nasty places.
One of the three detectives in the Davidson County Sheriff's Office who
pleaded this month to drug-conspiracy charges supplied the drugs for the
frame-up.

In January, Garry Frank, the district attorney in Davidson County, got a
visit from the SBI agents who were investigating the corruption case in the
sheriff's office. One of the detectives had confessed to a plot to frame Owens.

By then Owens had been on probation for 14 months for a crime he didn't commit.

It was every honest prosecutor's worst nightmare. "We're officers of
justice," Frank said. "North Carolina case law says that the DA is supposed
to be just as concerned to see that the innocent are acquitted as that the
guilty are convicted."

Owens was suspicious when SBI agents delivered the news.

"I didn't know whether to be happy or cry."

The prosecutor helps out

Who could blame him? When cops gets accused of corruption, the good guys
get tarnished with the bad. So Frank did the only thing he could do. The
prosecutor acted as Owens' advocate and argued for his innocence.

Are there others in prison for crimes they didn't do?

"I hope not," Frank said. "Doing the right thing with correcting the
injustice is the best thing to re-establishing credibility, because that's
what the public expects us to do."

On Monday, Judge Kimberly Taylor overturned Owens' conviction.

"This court concludes, as a matter of fact, ... that the convictions
obtained against the above captioned defendant were based on evidence
planted by an unknown individual in conjunction with a detective with the
Davidson County Sheriff's Office."

With that, justice came home to Darick Owens -18 months overdue.