Friday, February 06, 2004
Darryl Hunt is expected to be exonerated today in the 1984 rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, a crime for which he always maintained his innocence but served half his life in prison.
From the start, race played a role in the way the case was prosecuted and in the way it was perceived for the simple reason that Hunt is black and Sykes was white.
Hunt was 19 when he was arrested, just a month after Sykes, a 25-year-old newspaper copy editor, was stabbed to death on her way to work in downtown Winston-Salem on Aug. 10, 1984.
Hunt said yesterday that he didn't dare believe that his 19-year ordeal might be over after a hearing this morning in Forsyth Superior Court.
"I don't want to be optimistic and then go and be let down again," he said yesterday. "It's just the closer I get to the hearing, you always have that fear that they may do something crazy again and I would end up going back to prison."
Ten years ago, Hunt had expected to be freed after DNA testing ruled him out as the source of the semen evidence in the case. He was wrong. A Superior Court judge said that the DNA was not enough to even require a third trial, and every appeals court upheld that decision. It wasn't until DNA testing, ordered last spring at the request of Hunt's attorneys, linked another suspect to the crime late last year that the district attorney re-opened the case.
Judge Anderson Cromer of Forsyth Superior Court released Hunt from prison on an unsecured bond Dec. 24 after Willard Brown confessed to killing Sykes. Brown told police that Hunt was not involved in the crime, and according to Cromer's order, Brown even expressed remorse over Hunt's conviction.
A gag order, signed by Cromer, has prohibited investigators and attorneys in the case from talking about it since late December. District Attorney Tom Keith spent most of the week drafting papers for today's hearing, and he met yesterday with investigators from the State Bureau of Investigation.
Hunt's attorney, Mark Rabil, arrived at the courthouse yesterday evening for a meeting with Keith and Cromer.
Hunt filed a motion in December asking the court to vacate his conviction. Knowledgeable sources said that Keith would agree to that motion today.
"The only thing I've heard is that Keith has agreed to vacate the conviction," Hunt said yesterday. "Until it's signed, I think everyone's just waiting to see."
Keith has said that investigators have spent the past month substantiating Brown's confession. Brown was charged with murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery on Dec. 22. Police looked at him as a possible suspect in the Sykes murder in 1986 after the victim in a second rape in February 1985 identified him as her attacker.
The Sykes murder and the second rape were strikingly similar. Both victims were young, white women who were attacked on their way to work in a downtown office, and both were raped and stabbed. Police have not explained why they never prosecuted Brown in the second rape or why they ruled him out as a suspect in the Sykes murder. They have said that at some point in their investigation that they learned, mistakenly, that Brown was in prison the day Sykes was killed.
Court officials said they expect testimony from several witnesses today, but they declined to identify them.
Court officials also said that as far as they know, today's hearing will be the first test of the Innocence Protection Act, passed by the state legislature in 2001. The act authorizes post-conviction DNA testing, and 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."
Police first considered Hunt as a suspect in 1984 because a witness called 911 to report the attack and falsely identified himself as Sammy Mitchell. When police went to find Mitchell, they met Hunt, who spent most of his time in the summer of 1984 hanging around with Mitchell.
Mitchell was charged in the Sykes murder in 1990, but he has never been tried. DNA testing in 1994 ruled him out, too, as the rapist. His attorney said he planned on being in court today, in the hopes that Keith will also dismiss charges against Mitchell, who is in prison in an unrelated murder.
Court officials have been preparing all week for the hearing in Courtroom 5A. They expect between 200 and 500 people, and have arranged to broadcast the proceedings by closed-circuit television into a second courtroom on the sixth floor if that space is needed for the crowd.
Hunt's case continues to divide the public, as it has since his arrest.
From the start, the case became a parable about race and justice. A survey of jurors before his first trial in 1985 found that blacks overwhelmingly believed in his innocence and whites believed in his guilt. With the recent developments, some who previously accepted the guilty verdicts have come to question the justice system. But to others, Hunt remains a man who will always be associated with a brutal crime.
"If he didn't do it, I feel like he was in on it," said Betty James of Clemmons. "Was it two trials and two different juries and they both found him guilty? Well, I think he must have been guilty."
Those who believed in Hunt's innocence all along see the recent developments as vindication.
Vivian Spears, a retired nurse at Forsyth Medical Center, knew Hunt slightly before he was convicted and kept up with his case over the past 19 years. "By Deborah Sykes being a white woman, they were trying to solve the crime expeditiously without regard to whether the person was guilty or innocent," she said.
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com