Saturday, February 07, 2004
When DNA tests showed that he was not the man who had raped Deborah Sykes in 1984, Darryl Hunt said he thought he'd be released after serving almost 10 years in prison.
But it took another 10 years for Hunt to walk out of prison for good.
As a result of the DNA evidence, police and prosecutors changed their theory of the crime. And every state and appellate judge the matter came before turned down a chance to review the case. No one decided that the DNA evidence - which cleared not just Hunt of the rape but also two others who authorities had theorized might have been involved - warranted a new investigation.
The legal system, created to ferret out the truth, had ensnared an innocent man.
Hunt spent 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
District Attorney Tom Keith of Forsyth County did not apologize in court yesterday. And Superior Court Judge Anderson Cromer, who ordered Hunt's murder conviction overturned, only said that Hunt was a victim. He did not apologize, either.
Earl Dudley, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, said he has often puzzled why people in the legal system have a hard time admitting their mistakes.
"Trial lawyers, lawyers in general, are competitive, and trial lawyers are a particularly competitive subset," Dudley said.
"They don't like to lose. If they put someone in jail for a long time, they don't like to admit, 'I had the wrong guy,'" he said.
High-profiles cases are a particular problem, Dudley said. For elected district attorneys, the stakes become even higher.
"They do get a lot of pressure. What that sometimes does, is it leaves prosecutors and investigators to try to identify a prime suspect very early in the investigation," he said.
"And then to focus the effort on proving that person is guilty rather than taking a more objective and measured view of what the evidence shows. They get invested too early."
David Rudolf, a Charlotte defense attorney, said that human nature is at work in many cases of wrongful conviction.
"What ends up happening often in cases, is police get a theory early on," Rudolf said. "They don't have time to do exhaustive investigations. They focus on a theory and they exclude looking at evidence that's inconsistent with their theory."
The process of developing a theory begins with the criminal investigation and continues when a case reaches the courtroom.
The adversarial nature of the criminal-justice system tends to encourage people to line up on one side or the other, said Tom Ross, the director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. Ross was a Superior Court judge in Guilford County for 17 years.
"Your side becomes a position you believe in and you stick with," Ross said.
"It's not so much whether you're right or wrong, as to support your side of the case. To step back from that role is really hard sometimes."
Ross said that the system usually serves the cause of justice.
"I don't think anyone wants a wishy-washy prosecutor or a defense lawyer," he said. "The prosecutor's job is not to represent the victim. Their job is to seek justice."
The judge and jurors are supposed to be the neutral parties in this highly charged system. The public tends to give them both responsibility and respect.
"We believe deeply in the jury system in America," Ross said. "That's 12 citizens who have sat together and heard a case and reached a conclusion. You can't have a system in which you can willy-nilly reverse the decisions of a jury. They're a critical part of our system."
Some experts say that the system has clear drawbacks.
Anita Earls is the director of advocacy for the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights, a nonprofit organization committed to advancing civil rights and social justice, especially in the South. Earls said that over the past 40 years, society's perception of crime has pushed the courts into a convict-or-else mentality.
"Now there's so much emphasis on being tough on crime, tough on criminals, on crime being seen as such a huge problem for the quality of life," she said. "There's no room for mistakes. There's no room for errors. The last thing any judge wants is to be a judge who makes a mistake. The mistake we worry most about is letting a guilty person off. The other mistake, convicting the innocent person, doesn't upset us as much."
Earls said that the role of the courts in Hunt's case troubles her.
After two jury trials, Hunt's fate rested in the hands of appeals-court judges. They refused to consider the scientific significance of the DNA, the only physical evidence in the case, which had ruled Hunt out as the rapist.
"Too often, the courts become so politicized by the need to be tough on crime," Earls said. "They see a lot of cases and no doubt they see a lot of claims of innocence that are not merited. It might make it harder for them to reverse convictions."
Henry Frye a former N.C. Supreme Court justice, wrote the dissent in 1994 when the state's high court denied Hunt a third trial after the DNA evidence came out.
"It's better for four or five guilty people to go unpunished then for one nonguilty man to be convicted," he said.
Still, Frye said he knows that, based on conversations that he has had with judges, many believe they do need to be tough on crime.
"If you make a mistake and let that person go, then that's it," he said.
L. Gregory Jones, the dean of Duke Divinity School, said that to admit a mistake is seen in American culture as a sign of weakness.
"People apologize without personally acknowledging wrong," Jones said. "You see any acknowledgement expressed in the passive voice. It becomes, 'Mistakes were made.' That's different from saying, 'We tried to do what was right and we were wrong.'
"It takes great moral strength to admit that one made a mistake or was wrong."
• Mary Giunca can be reached at 727-4089 or at mgiunca@wsjournal.com