Born on June 28, 1955, Mark Rabil grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He attended Davidson College and upon graduation made the key decision to become a lawyer. In 1980 Mark graduated from University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill; he subsequently joined a law firm in Winston-Salem. In 1984, when he was just 29 years old, Mark was assigned to the Darryl Hunt case, which became known nationally as a shocking example of prosecutorial racism. In that year, Hunt was accused and found guilty of the gruesome rape-murder of Deborah Sykes, a white journalist. The case against him was built on testimony from dubious “eyewitnesses,” including a former member of the Ku Klux Klan; there was no physical evidence. The case shocked the city of Winston-Salem and divided the Black and White communities down the middle. It became Mark’s life’s work for the next 20 years, during which Hunt became one of his closest friends. From the very beginning Darryl Hunt was determined to fight the charge. Insisting he was innocent, he turned down plea deals that would have gotten him his freedom much earlier. Mark spent the next 19 years representing Hunt, investing thousands of hours of grueling work on multiple depositions, appeals, and trials. Despite clear evidence of Hunt’s innocence, multiple trials led to repeated guilty verdicts by all-White juries. For example, in 1994 DNA testing excluded Hunt as the source of the semen in the rape of Deborah Sykes, but a judge ruled the evidence insufficient for a new trial. Ultimately, the only way to win was to solve the case. Working with Richard McGough, a tireless private investigator, the team was able to match DNA evidence to the man responsible for the crime, and Hunt was cleared and released from prison in 2003. The decades in prison took their toll, however; tragically, Hunt was found dead in his vehicle in 2016. (Note: please see interview with Richard McGough in the Archive.) For his work defending Darryl Hunt, Rabil was awarded the Thurgood Marshall Award, among many honors. His commitment to racial and social justice led directly to the establishment of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, which has reviewed over 3,000 cases and secured exoneration for fifteen people. An important part of Rabil’s work is training future lawyers to recognize and fight racial injustice in the law. He has been the director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic at Wake Forest University School of Law since 2009 and has been a clinical professor there since 2013; he also teaches Trial Advocacy, Criminal Procedure, and Contemplative Practices.