On the evening of August 4, 1984, a 22-year-old woman was working at a dry cleaners on the north side of Indianapolis, Indiana, when a Black man knocked and asked if the shop was open. She let him in, and he asked to pick up clothes under the name “Button.” The woman, who was white, wasn’t able to locate an order under that name. The man then asked for clothing under the name of Evans or Harris.
When the woman turned her back to check for that order, the man attacked her with a pair of scissors. He held the scissors to her throat, took $5 from her wallet, and took cash from the register. He then forced the victim to remove her clothes and raped her. The man tied her up with electrical cords, covered her with clothing from the store, and fled.
The victim untied herself and ran to a nearby liquor store, where employees called the police. The victim was taken to a hospital, where a rape kit was collected.
Not long after, police showed the victim a number of mugshots and she did not identify anyone. She also viewed high school yearbooks and identified a recent graduate as her attacker. When she asked to see a live lineup including that man, the police told her he lived out of state and wasn’t available for questioning. No one was arrested at the time.
Nearly four months after the crime, the victim was shopping in a grocery store and saw 15-year-old Harold Buntin. She believed he was her attacker. She saw a police car nearby and alerted the police, who arrested Buntin. According to legal briefs filed later on Buntin’s behalf, the victim was legally blind in one eye and near-sighted in the other. Buntin was put in a live lineup, and the woman identified him as her attacker.
On January 29, 1985, Buntin was charged with rape and robbery.
Buntin went to trial in Marion County Superior Court on April 21, 1986. At that time, he was free on bond.
The victim identified him as her attacker, and described how she had been robbed and raped. She said she was unsure if he had ejaculated.
A forensic serologist testified that seminal fluid recovered from the victim’s body after the attack came from a person with Type O blood–which was also the blood type of both the victim and Buntin. The analyst testified that 36 percent of the population had this blood type, suggesting that 64 percent of the population was excluded.
On April 23, 1986, when Buntin’s family arose to get ready for the third day of the trial, they discovered that he was not at home. The judge continued the trial in Buntin’s absence. Later that day, the jury convicted Buntin of rape and robbery. He was not sentenced because he was not present.
When Buntin left during his trial, he fled to Florida where he took the last name of Evans, the surname of a grandparent. In 1994, after he was convicted of robbery there, officials discovered through fingerprint records that he was wanted in Indiana. He was extradited and appeared in Marion County Superior Court on January 12, 1994. He subsequently was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the rape and robbery at the dry cleaners.
He appealed his rape and robbery conviction and in 1996, his conviction and sentence were upheld by the Court of Appeals of Indiana.
In 1998, Buntin filed a petition for post-conviction relief after obtaining DNA testing that excluded him as the source of semen found in the rape kit. The case was pending before Superior Court Judge Grant Hawkins. The Indiana courts allow judges to delegate some matters to appointed commissioners. Nancy Broyles was the commissioner working with Judge Hawkins, and she presided over Buntin’s post-conviction proceedings.
A hearing was held on March 16, 2005. The new DNA evidence established that Buntin was not the source of the seminal fluid collected from the victim after the crime. By April 18, 2005, Buntin’s attorney, Carolyn Rader, and the prosecution had each submitted proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, with proposed orders, to Commissioner Broyles, and she took it under advisement.
On August 11, 2005, Buntin wrote a letter to the court inquiring about his case. Records from the Marion County Clerk’s Office showed that someone from the courtroom requested the Buntin file on August 25, 2005. Rader sent an email to Commissioner Broyles at the end of September 2005 inquiring about the status of the case. On September 30, 2005, Buntin sent another letter of inquiry to the court.
Records from the Marion County Clerk’s Office would later show that someone from the courtroom requested the Buntin file again on October 25, 2005. The clerk’s records showed at that time that the file could not be found.
On November 11, 2005, January 13, 2006, and April 20, 2006, Buntin wrote three more letters inquiring about his case. Rader sent an email to Commissioner Broyles on April 20, 2006, also inquiring about the status of the case. In addition, Buntin’s family made numerous calls to the courtroom about the case. None of the inquiries were answered.
On January 8, 2007, Buntin filed a complaint with the Indiana Commission on Judicial Qualifications against Commissioner Broyles concerning the lengthy delay in the ruling in his case. The Commission’s counsel, Meg Babcock, contacted Judge Hawkins during the first week of March 2007 to inquire about the matter. Judge Hawkins reported that the Buntin file could not be located but that court staff was looking for it. He told Babcock he would report back to her.
Staff in the Marion County Clerk’s Office then conducted an extensive search and could not locate the Buntin file. Mysteriously, the Buntin file appeared on a desk in Judge Hawkins’ offices around March 6, 2007. No staff member ever admitted being the person who found the Buntin file or the person who first received the file from the person who located it.
When Judge Hawkins opened the Buntin file after it was located, he found an order granting Buntin’s petition for post-conviction relief, which was signed by Commissioner Broyles and dated May 20, 2005, along with the attached note and a diskette containing the order. Judge Hawkins noted the signed order in the file contained some odd typographical errors apparently caused by the electronic transfer of the original document.
So, he inserted the diskette into his computer, corrected some of the errors, and reprinted the order, retaining the original signature page dated May 20, 2005. On March 8, 2007, the court issued the order granting Buntin’s petition for post-conviction relief which was dated May 20, 2005, but made effective March 8, 2007.
Judge Hawkins and Commissioner Broyles also issued a “Notice Explaining Delayed Ruling on Petition for Post-Conviction Relief” in which they reported, among other things, that Commissioner Broyles had signed an order granting PCR relief on “May 20, 2005,” that the Buntin file had been “archived” without the order being processed, and that the file had been “retrieved from archives.”
At this point, Judge Hawkins and Commissioner Broyles believed that Commissioner Broyles had signed the original order on May 20, 2005. It was only upon later reflection and a review of her personal records that Commissioner Broyles concluded she actually may have signed the order on May 20, 2006.
The evidence indicated that on May 20, 2006, Commissioner Broyles signed an order granting Buntin post-conviction relief. Commissioner Broyles said she agonized over her decision to grant Buntin a new trial. She believed the evidence strongly supported the jury’s finding of guilt and the new DNA evidence did not exonerate Buntin because the victim testified that her attacker may not have ejaculated.
Commissioner Broyles concluded, however, that the new DNA evidence casted sufficient doubt on the reliability of the original jury verdict that Buntin deserved a new trial.
Although Commissioner Broyles signed the order in 2006, she said she inadvertently retained the typewritten year “2005” from the proposed order Buntin’s attorney had provided in 2005.
Commissioner Broyles attached a note to the order with instructions for processing it. The note included reference to an incomplete date: “05-20-0”. The order was not processed.
On March 21, 2007, Judge Hawkins told the Judicial Commission that in the normal course of events, when someone is waiting for a ruling, they call or write the court and that Buntin’s attorney did not write or call and that Buntin did not write. Both assertions were not true.
Both Buntin and his attorney had contacted the court in writing on several occasions and all inquiries were unheeded. The five letters from Buntin were not in his file, but were later discovered in what the clerk’s office called the “Can’t Find File.” This was a file used to hold documents for which staff could not locate the file. The staff would decide whether a judicial officer needed to see the material right away. If they decided it was not that important, they would put the materials in the “Can’t Find File” file. Some materials stayed in this file for months, even years, according to staffers.
Although the Buntin order granting a new trial was issued on March 8, 2007, no one entered the order into the system until March 27, 2007—a delay of nearly three weeks. It was only after members of Buntin’s family called the court inquiring about the case that Judge Hawkins scheduled a hearing for April 20, 2007.
At the hearing, the State elected not to retry Buntin on charges based on events nearly 23 years in the past. The charges were dismissed and Buntin was released.
In their explanation of the delayed ruling, Judge Hawkins and Commissioner Broyles said, “Whether the bailiff failed to follow the provided directions or whether the deputy clerk assigned to this court failed to discharge her responsibilities, the order was never entered [into the] record and copies were never distributed to the interested parties. Rather, the file was closed and archived as if the court’s order had been properly entered into the record."
In March 2009, the Indiana Supreme Court ordered Judge Hawkins suspended for 60 days without pay for the mishandling of Buntin’s case which caused Buntin to spend nearly two years in prison after his convictions had been vacated. Commissioner Broyles was permanently banned from serving in any judicial capacity.
Buntin later sued the county and the lawsuit was dismissed. He filed a malpractice lawsuit against his attorney and was awarded $225,000. After Indiana enacted a law in 2019 enabling wrongfully convicted defendants to seek compensation from the state, Buntin filed a claim and was awarded $522,877 in 2023.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 07-16-2026
