Jim O’Neill has been the district attorney of Forsyth County, North Carolina, since 2009. In the Nov. 3 election, voters in the county that includes Winston-Salem chose someone else. Democrat Amara Hunter won 82,214 votes to O’Neill’s 68,993, a margin of 13,221, or 54.3% to 45.7% in unofficial results.
For Black defendants and the families fighting to free them, this race matters more than most. As the outlet Bolts reported, O’Neill spent his tenure on the other side of the tools that have helped free innocent people in this state. He called the Racial Justice Act, which let death row prisoners argue that race shaped their sentences, “a covert effort to end the death penalty.” In 2012 he trained prosecutors across North Carolina on how to fight those motions. He dismissed the state’s Innocence Inquiry Commission as “a waste of taxpayer money.”
Bolts also counts nine people from Forsyth County on North Carolina’s death row, five of them Black. Gov. Roy Cooper commuted three Forsyth County sentences in 2024.
The county knows what a wrong conviction costs. Darryl Hunt, a Black man from Winston-Salem, was convicted in 1984 and spent two decades in prison before DNA evidence cleared him in 2004. O’Neill did not prosecute that case. But Bolts reports his office fought the exoneration of two Black men convicted as teenagers in another case.
O’Neill has an argument, and voters heard it for 17 years: he prosecuted violent crime and sexual assault, and the sheriff and local law enforcement backed him. Our answer is that a prosecutor’s job includes asking whether the person in prison should be there, and his office too often refused to.
Hunter knows the office from the inside. She is a former police officer who worked in Detroit and as a prosecutor, served as an assistant district attorney under O’Neill, and then moved to the Forsyth County Public Defender’s Office. Gov. Josh Stein endorsed her. She has said she will use “her decades of public safety service to understand the judicial system and fight for accountability,” and she campaigned on youth diversion programs, faster case processing and community listening sessions in public libraries.
A new DA can reopen the files O’Neill’s office fought over, review convictions that carry the marks of race and haste, and stop treating the commission that exists to find the wrongly convicted as an enemy. Hunter should do all three.
O’Neill’s term ends Dec. 31.
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