Sunday, February 1, 2004
A Superior Court judge is expected to rule Friday on whether to overturn Darryl Hunt's murder conviction in the 1984 rape and stabbing of Deborah Sykes.
But the secrecy surrounding the case makes it unclear whether two central questions will be answered. Will Hunt be exonerated? Will it ever be clear how many people attacked Sykes as she walked from her car to work in downtown Winston-Salem?
Police reopened the case in December after DNA testing led them to Willard Brown, who they said confessed to the Sykes murder after the state crime lab matched his DNA with the semen evidence in the case. Brown has been charged with murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery.
Brown told police that he acted alone and that Hunt was not involved in the crime. Brown even expressed remorse for Hunt's conviction. Hunt was released from prison Dec. 24 on the strength of Brown's confession, but after 19 years, many people close to the case, including Sykes' family, find it hard to believe that Brown acted alone. The police and prosecutors, citing a court-imposed gag order, are not talking.
Hunt said last week he knows that regardless of what happens Friday some people will never believe in his innocence.
"Some will and some won't, because people have been indoctrinated with the idea that it was more than one person for almost 20 years," he said. "If the state admits that they made a mistake, I think that would help in bringing about the vindication as far as the public is concerned. Until they do that, I think there will always be a shadow. Not only do I want the conviction overturned, I want my name cleared. "
Superior Court Judge Anderson Cromer imposed the gag order on the attorneys and investigators in the case to protect the rights of both Hunt and Brown, which means that neither side has been able to discuss the hearing scheduled for Friday.
"I don't think there's going to be a gag order after Feb. 6," Cromer said. "The gag order speaks for itself. It's not to deny the public the right to know. That's why we're going to have a hearing. So everyone will know."
Legal experts said that the hearing could play out in several ways. Forsyth District Attorney Tom Keith could join in a motion from Hunt's attorneys or file his own asking that the conviction be overturned, or he could oppose Hunt's motion and leave the decision to Cromer.
The Innocence Protection Act, which was passed by the state legislature in 2001, gives a judge considerable latitude in such cases. Cromer could dismiss the charges against Hunt, vacate his conviction and sentence, grant a new trial or "enter any order that serves the interest of justice."
If Cromer overturns the conviction, it could lead to financial compensation for Hunt, who has a petition before Gov. Mike Easley for a pardon. A pardon is required in order for Hunt to be remunerated for wrongful imprisonment - $20,000 a year for each of the 18 years he served.
The legal remedies, however, would not necessarily clear Hunt's name, or settle the unanswered questions in the case.
"This is the problem with exoneration after a conviction," said James Coleman, a law professor at Duke University and a member of the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission. "People believe so strongly in the criminal-justice system that they believe this wouldn't have happened if he hadn't done something. This means an innocent person will always be stigmatized unless the prosecutors concede that they made mistakes and fully explain what the facts are."
Keith said that he will file a detailed report in the case, reviewing the findings of the investigation of the past month. The gag order, he said, prevents him from disclosing what will be in his report.
Mark Rabil, Hunt's attorney, said he, too, cannot comment in detail.
"I remain confident that charges will be dismissed against Darryl," he said.
Legal experts said that authorities here should follow the example of prosecutors in New York, where convictions in the celebrated Central Park jogger case were overturned in 2002 after DNA testing identified another suspect. The Manhattan district attorney ordered an eight-month investigation and eventually filed a 58-page report that explained in detail why he believed that convictions against five men should all be overturned.
"The beauty of what they did is they summarized their findings as to why they believed the Central Park jogger attacker acted alone," said Steve Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern University and an attorney with the school's Center on Wrongful Convictions.
"In a sense, they owe it to Darryl Hunt to do that. As long as they send out mixed messages that he was involved in some way, he will have to live under the specter of guilt. What you don't want is some shortcut that says, 'Given this information no reasonable jury would convict.' You want something a little stronger, that says Hunt was not involved."
Long-held beliefs
The belief in Hunt's guilt stems from the long-held theory by police and prosecutors that more than one man participated in raping and stabbing Sykes to death.
That theory was reached despite conflicting eyewitness testimony.
Six eyewitnesses said they saw parts of the attack on the morning of Aug. 10, 1984. One witness, Johnny Gray, called 911 to report the attack, and two other men also saw the attack. All three reported a single attacker. Those accounts tend to match Brown's statement that he acted alone.
A fourth person, Thomas Murphy, reported seeing a white woman on West End Boulevard in the company of a black man. He also said he saw a second man 100 feet down the street.
Two other witnesses reported seeing Sykes with two men before the attack. Their statements are cited by people who continue to believe that Brown did not act alone. Yet neither statement supports the theory that Hunt and Brown acted together.
One of the witnesses, William Hooper, specifically testified that Hunt was not one of the two people he saw, and he was never able to identify anyone else from police photos. The other witness, Kevey Coleman, was not interviewed by authorities until two years after the crime and was not wearing his contact lenses the morning in question. He told authorities the two men he saw looked like Hunt and Sammy Mitchell, whom Hunt has always said he was with the previous night and morning of the murder.
Lew Stringer, the medical examiner at the time, also believed that more than one man attacked Sykes. Investigators found her body in an overgrown park, beside a dirt path that was covered with bits of broken glass. Her shoes were found at the other end of the path. Stringer said he looked for shards of glass in her feet and found none. Because she was 5 feet 10, he didn't believe that one man could have carried her alone, and so he theorized that two people had to be involved.
Stringer declined to be interviewed for this story, saying that he is working for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. A spokesman for the agency could not confirm Stringer's employment there but said that agency employees are not prohibited from speaking with the press.
Prosecutors Dean Bowman and James Yeatts, who argued the theory of multiple attackers at Hunt's second trial, also declined to comment.
Hunt is the only person ever convicted in Sykes' death, but investigators believed over the years that Mitchell, and possibly even Gray, were involved with her death. Mitchell was charged with her murder in 1990 but has never been tried. He is in prison serving a 50-year sentence in another murder; Gray died in prison in 2001.
Though the evidence of multiple attackers was never conclusive, it has been enough to keep Hunt in prison. In 1994, DNA testing ruled out Hunt, Mitchell and Gray as the rapist, but appellate courts have all ruled that the DNA didn't exclude Hunt as one of the attackers.
New investigation
Police and prosecutors considered the Sykes case closed until Cromer ordered a new round of DNA testing last April, which enabled the state crime lab to match the semen evidence in the case against state and federal databases of convicted felons.
The testing produced a partial match with one of Brown's brothers. That led police to Brown, who had been a suspect in a February 1985 downtown rape of a woman who worked for Integon Corp., the company now known as GMAC.
Police had briefly considered Brown as a suspect in the Sykes murder, too, because the second rape was so similar to the attack on Sykes. Both women were young, white and on their way to jobs in downtown offices after parking their cars.
Brown was interviewed in March 1986 - by which time Hunt already was serving a life sentence - but the police have declined to explain why they didn't pursue him further as a suspect in the Sykes case or why they did not prosecute him in the second rape.
At some point during their investigation, the police have said, they mistakenly believed that Brown was in prison the day that Sykes was killed.
The investigative reports from the second rape, which could explain more about how Brown was overlooked all these years, have not been released. Police and prosecutors say that they are part of the current investigation, which is being conducted by SBI agent Scott Williams and police detective Mike Rowe.
Since Brown's confession in the Sykes case, investigators have spent the last month trying to substantiate his account of what happened, Keith has said.
Investigators will not comment further on their work. Keith did have two inmates from the N.C. Department of Correction transferred to the Forsyth County Jail last month for questioning in connection with the Hunt case. It's not clear what they said or whether investigators gave them any credence.
Keith also asked the SBI to run additional DNA tests in the Sykes case on fingernail scrapings and hair samples that had never been tested. It was not clear last week whether there were any results from those tests.
Facing the future
Hunt spent his first month of freedom juggling family life with his role as a sudden local celebrity. He lives with his wife and her three children. In recent weeks, he started working with a friend's remodeling company and has been taking a class at Winston-Salem State University in American government.
The Ministers' Conference of Winston-Salem and Vicinity two weeks ago gave Hunt its Martin Luther King Jr. Courage Award, and he has spoken to other churches and community groups about the 18 years he spent in prison for a crime he always denied committing.
Hunt said he has thought about his case as much as anyone. He, too, he said, wonders how many people were at the scene with Brown the morning of Aug. 10, 1984.
"The only person who could tell us this is Willard Brown," Hunt said. "I'm waiting to see what he said about what happened. I'm sure he had to give them specifics for us to be at this stage."
If Hunt is exonerated Friday, he will be the 141st person in the country to be cleared by DNA evidence. Whether that clears his name is as yet unknown.
"It is hard for people to completely turn away from a construct of beliefs that they've built up over decades," said Rich Rosen, a law professor at UNC Chapel Hill and a member of the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission.
"There are going to be people who have a psychological stake in the guilt of the defendant that, no matter what the evidence, they're not going to give it up.... It's not easy for people to admit that they were wrong."
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com