A Kanawha judge handed down the maximum sentence to a man who sexually assaulted a woman on Charleston's East End in 2011 and had previously been convicted of second-degree rape in North Carolina.
Curtis Allen Hairston was sentenced Friday to spend 15 to 35 years in prison. He pleaded guilty in August to first-degree sexual assault.
Before his sentence was handed down, Hairston tried to withdraw his plea and said he was actually innocent of the assault. Circuit Judge Jennifer Bailey refused to allow him to back out of the deal. She also sentenced Hairston to 50 years of supervised release and to spend the rest of his life registering as a sex offender.
Hairston's case had been pending for several years, as he switched court-appointed attorneys several times. In August, the day after a jury had been picked for his trial, he decided to admit to the sexual assault.
In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors dismissed charges of second-degree sexual assault and burglary. Assistant Kanawha prosecutor Michele Drummond also agreed to stand silent and not provide a recommendation about sentencing to the judge.
The victim attended Friday's hearing and asked the judge to sentence Hairston to the maximum amount of jail time, the prosecutor said.
"She addressed the judge [on Friday] and talked about how it was to wake up to someone in your bedroom and how it's affected her life until now," Drummond said about the victim.
On Aug. 30, 2011, she woke up in her Franklin Avenue apartment to Hairston placing a pillow over her head. Hairston began choking the woman and she tried to fight him off until she felt a metal object against her skin and Hairston threatened to shoot and kill her.
Hairston kept his face covered during the rape, but he left behind a used condom. Testing conducted at the West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory found Hairston's DNA on the condom, the prosecutor said.
In the motion to withdraw his plea, Hairston alleged detectives falsified DNA evidence and that he never received a transcript of the grand jury proceedings, which resulted in his indictment. He was represented by attorney Ed Bullman.
Drummond said that the judge on Friday, "discussed the law regarding pleas of guilty and found that under the law and under the facts that it didn't merit granting a withdraw."
At the time he was indicted in 2011 by a Kanawha County grand jury, Hairston was already in jail, facing a charge of failing to register as a sex offender.
He'd pleaded guilty in 1998 to second-degree rape in Person County, North Carolina, according to online court documents from that county. He was sentenced to five years in prison. According to an appeal filed with the North Carolina Supreme Court, he also had been charged with first-degree rape in 2006, as well as sexual battery in 2007. Prosecutors dismissed the rape charge when he pleaded guilty to sexual battery. For that charge, he was sentenced to 150 days in jail and ordered to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
In 2011, the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld a decision that Hairston should be placed on satellite monitoring for the remainder of his life because he was a repeat offender.
Hairston was transported back to jail after Friday's hearing. The judge said he would get credit for 1,100 days he has already served, the prosecutor said.
Reach Kate White at kate.white@wvgazette.com, 304-348-1723 or follow @KateLWhite on Twitter.