How can I kill a <defunct> process whose parent is init?

Transmission is intermittently hanging on my NAS. If I send SIGTERM, it doesn't disappear from the process list and a ` label appears next to it. If I send a SIGKILL, it still doesn't disappear and I can't terminate the parent because the parent is init`. The only way I can get rid of the process and restart Transmission is to reboot. I realize the best thing I can do is try and fix Transmission (and I've tried), but I'm a novice at compiling and I wanted to make sure my torrents finished before I start messing around with it.