An interesting effect of Fermi motion in n( gamma , pi ^-)p experiments on deuteron targets is the appearance of apparently parity-violating types of observables like asymmetry in the reaction plane and helicity of the recoil nucleon; these are found to be as large as 20% at typical geometries in the intermediate-energy region. Since these observables disappear in the limit of the spectator momentum tending to zero, their measurements provide a direct method to study the Fermi momentum distributions.