Sunday, December 28, 2003
Throughout the negotiations last week that led to Darryl Hunt's release, District Attorney Tom Keith appeared to be clinging to old theories that could still tie Hunt to the 1984 murder of Deborah Sykes.
But in an interview Friday, Keith all but apologized for the mistakes that led to Hunt's imprisonment, and he said that the justice system needs to learn from those mistakes.
A new suspect was charged with the killing last week, and the court order that released Hunt said Willard E. Brown confessed that he acted alone when he raped and killed Sykes. Brown was identified after DNA testing found a match between him and the semen collected from the crime scene.
The police never had any physical evidence to link Hunt to Sykes' murder, and when DNA testing in 1994 ruled him out as the rapist, Keith opposed Hunt's request for a new trial.
"When this is all over with, I'd like to meet with him and talk to him and ask what he thinks we should have done. Nobody wants this to happen again," Keith said. "He's a man who had 19 years in prison for Mr. Brown's crime.
"Hopefully this wouldn't happen again. I'm sorry that it did. We will do better."
The case has divided the community for almost 20 years, pitting law enforcement against Hunt's supporters, who have argued from the start that Hunt had been wrongly accused.
That ill will carried over into the events leading up to Hunt's release, with Keith at first saying that Brown could be the third suspect that authorities long believe had to be involved. That comment prompted Hunt's supporters to continue their criticism of Keith for the way he was handling the case.
Keith declined to say whether he expects Hunt's conviction to be overturned at a hearing Feb. 6. He said he cannot discuss the details in the continuing investigation of Brown.
"From what I know now it certainly appears, I would say things look very good for Mr. Hunt," Keith said.
"I pray to God that this teaches"
With Hunt home awaiting the hearing, people on both sides said last week that it is time to look at the mistakes of the police, prosecutors and the courts.
Jim Shaw, a vice president of the local chapter of the NAACP, sat at Emmanuel Baptist Church Wednesday morning waiting for Hunt's release.
"I pray to God that this teaches," he said. "We as a people ... we have to go ahead and pray that our justice system will look hard at itself. We have to move forward."
Sykes was raped and stabbed 16 times on Aug. 10, 1984, in a park near the downtown offices of The Sentinel, then the afternoon newspaper where she worked as a copy editor. She was 25.
Hunt, then 19, was arrested a month later after police followed up on the only clue they had - a 911 call from a man who claimed to be Sammy Mitchell, Hunt's friend. It turned out that the caller, Johnny Gray, was lying. When he eventually came forward two weeks later, he identified another man.
By then, however, police were already looking at Hunt and Mitchell as their suspects. Another witness identified Hunt from a lineup. After Gray also identified him, Hunt was charged with murder.
Six months after Sykes' murder, another woman was attacked on her way to work two blocks from where Sykes was killed. This second victim was 20, and worked at the Integon insurance company, now GMAC. A man accosted her at gunpoint, forced her back to her car and had her drive to a field behind a drive-in theater on Old Greensboro Road. He raped her and cut her face 12 times.
The woman identified Brown from a photo lineup, but decided not to prosecute. Police recognized the similarities between the two crimes, but did not pursue Brown as a suspect in the Sykes murder because they mistakenly believed that he had been in prison on Aug. 10.
Police Chief Linda Davis said last week that police interviewed Brown in March 1986 in connection with the Sykes murder, but he denied any involvement and the matter was dropped. As recently as last month, police still believed that Brown was in prison when Sykes was killed.
Developing evidence
Even after DNA testing in 1994 excluded Hunt, Mitchell and Gray as the rapist, the police did not look for the man who raped Sykes. The case against Hunt was closed, until his attorneys asked for a new round of DNA testing this year.
In April, Judge Anderson Cromer ordered the state crime lab to compare the DNA evidence in the Sykes case to the national database of DNA from convicted felons. The lab found a near match this month with one of Brown's brothers, which led them to check Brown's criminal record. His DNA is not in the national database, but when police had Brown tested, authorities said, his DNA matched the evidence in the Sykes case.
Neither Keith nor Davis could explain Friday how they overlooked Brown all these years, but Keith said that he wants Wake Forest University and Winston-Salem State University to use the case as the basis for a course on the weaknesses in the criminal justice system.
"What are the things that went wrong and why, not so we can lay blame but so we can fix it," Keith said.
He and Davis said that local law enforcement has changed a lot in the years since Hunt was first arrested and convicted. Keith, for example, said he no longer asks for the death penalty in cases in which he has no physical evidence or statements from co-defendants that corroborate eyewitnesses.
Davis said that detectives in her department are better trained than they were when Hunt's case was investigated in 1984, and again in 1986 and 1990. She said that detectives are trained now to keep an open mind throughout an investigation.
"We don't develop theories. We develop evidence. Because we have read the same publications you have about tunnel vision, we are acutely aware of that potential," she said.
She said that the police department is also reviewing recent recommendations from the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission on reforming lineup procedures to reduce error.
Post-conviction work failed
Hunt's 18 years in prison was not just the result of police and prosecution error.
After DNA testing ruled him out as the rapist, his attorneys appealed for a third trial, but every state and appellate court turned him down. The courts all ruled that the DNA evidence proved that Hunt was not the person who ejaculated but did not contradict the witnesses who said they saw Hunt with Sykes at the murder scene.
Richard Rosen, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a member of the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission, said that Hunt should have been released nine years ago, when the DNA evidence first came out.
"Our post-conviction review didn't work. Something's not working there. It should not have taken this last bit of evidence to get Darryl Hunt out of prison," Rosen said. "Think about the chances of that happening. Brown could have been killed years ago. This was incredibly fortuitous that Brown was around and they obtained his DNA. Darryl Hunt could have been in prison for the rest of his life with all these folks around saying they were absolutely sure that he was guilty."
As recently as a month ago, Keith's top deputy, Eric Saunders, who has handled Hunt's case for the last 10 years said that he was certain of Hunt's guilt, as well as Mitchell. An attorney for Mitchell, who was indicted in the murder but never tried, said last week that he hoped the Brown arrest eventually would lead to charges being dropped for his client. Mitchell is in prison on an unrelated murder conviction.
Last year, the chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, I. Beverly Lake Jr., convened the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission to propose reforms that aimed at preventing wrongful convictions.
Chris Mumma, the commission's executive director, said that the public doesn't want to believe that the system makes mistakes. She said that even some of the members of the commission had a hard time believing that innocent people had been convicted until she told them the story of Ronald Cotton, a Burlington man who was convicted of rape after the victim identified him.
DNA evidence eventually proved the victim wrong, and led to the identification of another suspect and to Cotton's exoneration.
"You could just see the light come on as they were listening," Mumma said. "I think the most important thing for people to get in general is that it happens. That's the beauty of DNA. There's been a lot of people (saying) that wrongful convictions don't happen. They can't believe that any more."
Mumma said that the adversarial system makes it difficult to overturn wrongful convictions. Each side is trying to win, making it hard to pursue the truth, she said. She pointed to an alternative in the United Kingdom.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission is an independent body responsible for investigating "suspected miscarriages of justice" in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
"You remove the egos," Mumma said. "It's not the defense trying to win or the prosecution trying to protect their conviction."
At a press conference Wednesday at Emmanuel Baptist Church, Hunt was asked if he feels anger over his imprisonment.
"No," he replied. "I can't remember who exactly told me about this, but years ago they told me if you're angry and bitter it destroys you from within.
"The injustice is hard to deal with itself," Hunt said. "I want to live. I don't want to die."
Davis, the police chief, said she was so moved by those words she wrote them down. Keith also said he thought that Hunt had spoken with wisdom.
"He's a better man than I am," Keith said.