Monday, December 29, 2003
The fight to free Darryl Hunt is not over, the Rev. Carlton Eversley said as Hunt and his wife visited Eversley's church yesterday in Winston-Salem.
"We pray that District Attorney Tom Keith will do the right thing," he said in a prayer during the service. He welcomed Hunt and his wife, April, to Dellabrook Presbyterian Church, their first public appearance since Wednesday, when Hunt was freed after a new suspect was charged in the rape and murder in 1984 of Deborah Sykes.
Sykes, who was 25, worked as a copy editor at The Sentinel, a now defunct afternoon paper. She was raped and stabbed 16 times on her way to work the morning of Aug. 10, 1984.
The charges against Hunt have not been dismissed, but they could be dismissed at a Feb. 6 hearing.
About 30 people gathered yesterday to greet him, a much smaller and more intimate crowd than the joyous homecoming he received at Emmanuel Baptist Church on Wednesday.
Hunt urged them to remember the family of Deborah Sykes, especially her mother, Evelyn Jefferson, who said she was shocked by the developments in her daughter's case in the past few weeks. She says she still thinks Hunt was involved in Sykes' murder.
"She has been through as much mental torture, more than me," Hunt said after the service. "It was her daughter that was killed. It's like being a victim all over again. She needs all the prayers and support she can get."
Hunt also told them that he is not the only man in prison wrongly convicted.
"There's another Darryl Hunt in prison somewhere," he said. "I pray that the same support given to me will be given to them. It gets harder and harder for them to receive justice because of the way the system is made up."
The issue of race has infused the case from the beginning, with many black leaders charging that Hunt, a black man, was being railroaded for the rape and murder of a white woman.
"That was the problem in this case," Eversley said in a sermon. "Folks thought they knew. The prosecutors thought they knew. The police thought they knew.... They didn't know squat. It happens when you combine racism with arrogance and with ignorance."
A new suspect was charged with the killing last week, and the court order that released Hunt stated that 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.
An eight-part series by the Winston-Salem Journal last month documented flaws in the case against Hunt, showing that police used questionable tactics and witnesses to focus on him as a suspect. The series also explained how authorities changed their theory of the crime when DNA evidence showed in 1994 that Hunt did not rape Sykes.
The series pointed out another downtown rape, in 1985, in which the victim had identified Brown but decided not to press charges. As recently as last month, the police still believed that Brown was in prison when Sykes was killed, though a recent check with the records division of the N.C. Department of Correction revealed that Brown had been released two months before Sykes' murder.
This would never have happened, Eversley said, if Hunt had been white and accused of raping and killing a black woman.
"You cannot reverse this case...," he said. "You expect black people to accept the illegitimacy of this system that victimizes them every day."
I. Beverly Lake Jr., the chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, convened the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission last year to propose reforms that aimed at preventing wrongful convictions.
In a brief interview from Pamlico County, where he is vacationing, Lake said he was unsure about the role that racism may have played in Hunt's case. However, what he has read disturbs him.
"We certainly need to adapt to make sure we're doing everything ... that something like this doesn't happen again," he said.
The commission has proposed new procedures for police to follow to reduce mistakes by eyewitnesses. The Winston-Salem police used questionable methods during the investigation that led to Hunt's arrest, according to the Journal's series about the case.
For example, the commission recommends that the investigating officer should not be the one to conduct a lineup because he might inadvertently give hints to a witness about the suspect's identity. In Hunt's case, the lead detective conducted the lineups.
District Attorney Tom Keith of Forsyth County and Police Chief Linda Davis said that prosecutors and police detectives are improving their procedures to prevent the type of mistakes that led to Hunt's imprisonment.
Hunt said yesterday that he was adjusting to his freedom. He said he sometimes walks out his front door just to see if he can. He touches himself or his wife to make sure he is not dreaming.
April Hunt said she loves that she can cook breakfast for her husband, and that she does not have to drive hours before she can see him.
"I just feel real blessed," she said.
• Michael Hewlett can be reached at 727-7326 or at mhewlett@wsjournal.com