Friday, April 16, 2004
Gov. Mike Easley pardoned Darryl Hunt yesterday in the 1984 rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, proclaiming Hunt innocent of the crime for which he served 18 years in prison.
The pardon entitles Hunt to $20,000 for each year he was wrongly imprisoned, or about $360,000. Coming more than two months after a Superior Court judge vacated the murder conviction in the case, the pardon also gives him another chance to clear his name, Hunt said.
"Finally, my innocence is recognized," Hunt said in an interview at his home, "in the sense that for so many years I have been trying to prove my innocence only to be told I was lying, and to finally have it official means a lot."
Easley issued a brief news release about 5:30 p.m., after notifying Sykes' mother and Hunt's attorney of his decision.
"After careful, extensive review and consideration, I am granting a pardon of innocence for Darryl Eugene Hunt," Easley said in a statement. "This pardon exonerates Mr. Hunt of his October 1990 first-degree murder conviction. All parties have been notified of this decision and the facts and circumstances surrounding this case."
Hunt got the news from his attorney, Mark Rabil, who called him by cell phone. Hunt and his wife have been looking at houses recently, and they were in the family room of a house on the south side of town when the cell phone rang. April Hunt said she was looking at the fireplace, imagining life with her husband and three children in a spacious house she could call her own.
"I would say it's like closure," she said later in the evening. "Now we can go on with our lives with that peace within us knowing that Darryl is pardoned."
For some people, the pardon was the end of a long struggle to support a man they believed had been wrongfully imprisoned.
Estella McFadden was a member of the Darryl Hunt Defense Committee and for years had sent him spending money in prison. She maintained that he was innocent through his years in prison.
"I'm glad," she said. "He's an innocent man. He (Easley) had to do something.... He should have never been in jail because they never had any physical evidence that he was involved."
For others, the pardon was another outrage.
Evelyn Jefferson, Sykes' mother, said she expected Easley to give more weight to the eyewitnesses who had identified Hunt 19 years ago and to the verdicts by two different juries. In spite of the DNA evidence that links another man, and the recent police investigation that showed the new suspect had acted alone, Jefferson said she still believes that Hunt was somehow involved in her daughter's death.
"I actually thought Governor Easley was more intelligent than that," she said in a telephone interview from her home outside Chattanooga, Tenn. "It does not increase my hurt. It does not decrease my hurt. The facts still remain and I have known for a long time that I will live with this for the rest of my life. It's just the way the world is."
Hunt was freed Dec. 24 after DNA testing in the Sykes case identified the new suspect, Willard Brown, who authorities said later confessed to having committed the crime by himself. Brown has since been charged with murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery. No court date has been set for Brown, who is being held without bond.
Tom Keith, Forsyth County's district attorney, praised Easley's decisiveness on the pardon.
"He knows it's a tough case, and he made a quick decision," Keith said last night. "I don't think there's anything he could do but that.
"I think it was quickly done - in Mike's case, probably courageously," he said. "He could have waited until his last day in office. Politically, there's fallout on both sides."
Easley and his legal counsel, Reuben Young, declined to discuss the case yesterday. But the three-page document granting the pardon makes it clear that Easley accepts the recent developments in the case.
He refers to testimony at Hunt's court hearing in February by Detective Mike Rowe of the Winston-Salem Police Department and Scott Williams, an agent with the State Bureau of Investigation, who both said that there is no longer any evidence that Hunt was involved in the rape or murder of Sykes.
The Winston-Salem City Council has appointed a citizens panel to review the investigations that led to Hunt's wrongful conviction. All but two of the original investigators involved in Hunt's prosecution have retired from the police department.
"You lay it out there and it falls where it falls," one of those who investigated the case, police Lt. Randy Weavil said last night. "I really don't have anything to say about it."
Hunt's attorneys and longtime supporters said they are happy for Hunt, but they don't expect Easley's decision to change people who still believe in Hunt's guilt.
The Rev. John Mendez, a founder of the Darryl Hunt Defense Committee, said: "Probably some people will come around, but for those who do not, you have to raise the question of whether they are interested in truth or if they are interested in trying to preserve and protect their own ideological beliefs which are racist to the core."
The Sykes murder and imprisonment of Hunt has long raised questions, largely along racial lines.
Many people believe that Hunt was wrongly singled out in the brutal attack, while others believe that Hunt, who was found guilty by two juries, received special consideration because his supporters always raised race as an issue.
The police never had any physical evidence to tie Hunt to Sykes' death, which occurred after she parked her car on West End Boulevard about 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10, 1984.
The police relied on eyewitnesses, including a man named Johnny Gray, who first called 911 to report the attack using a false name - that of Sammy Mitchell, a friend of Hunt's. When Gray came forward to acknowledge making the call two weeks later, he identified not Hunt, but another man as the attacker. And that person was in jail at the time. Authorities later came to believe that Gray himself may have been involved in the attack on Sykes.
After being convicted at his first trial in 1985 in Forsyth County, where one black man served on the jury, Hunt won a second trial. That trial, in 1990, was moved to Catawba County, and an all-white jury convicted him a second time.
He appealed that conviction, arguing first that prosecutors had withheld evidence and later that the DNA evidence developed in 1994 - excluding him as the source of semen found on Sykes - entitled him to a third trial. Hunt lost his last appeal in federal court in 2000. Judges ruled that the fact the DNA evidence did not match Hunt did not necessarily exclude him from having participated in the attack on Sykes.
Further testing of the semen sample showed that it failed to match Mitchell or Gray, the state's two other suspects in the case. Neither prosecutors nor police ever ordered a new investigation to try to find the person responsible for raping Sykes.
Last April, a Superior Court judge approved, without opposition from Keith, a request to compare the DNA evidence in the case against state and federal databases of convicted felons.
An eight-part series by the Winston-Salem Journal last November documented flaws in the case against Hunt, showing that police used questionable tactics and witnesses to focus on him as a suspect.
The series pointed out another downtown rape in 1985, which had characteristics similar to the attack on Sykes, a copy editor for The Sentinel newspaper. In that case, the victim had identified Brown, but decided not to press charges.
Under state law, Hunt is eligible for compensation from the state for wrongful imprisonment, but he must apply to the N.C. Industrial Commission, which routinely hears worker-compensation and other types of compensation cases.
His attorneys said they will apply for Hunt's compensation immediately, and they plan to help him put the money in trust for a house, his education and his future financial security.
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com
• David Rice can be reached in Raleigh at (919) 833-9056 or at drice@wsjournal.com
• Journal reporter Danielle Deaver contributed to this report.