Saturday, December 16, 2004
The wrongful conviction of Darryl Hunt, released a year ago after serving 18 years for murder in the 1984 rape and stabbing of Deborah Sykes, has helped lead to a series of reforms in the way that the police and courts handle criminal cases.
Hunt's release came about Christmas Eve after DNA testing identified another man, Willard Brown, as a suspect. Authorities said that when confronted, Brown confessed to the crime and that he told them that he acted alone.
Brown is scheduled to plead guilty today in Forsyth Superior Court to murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery in exchange for a life sentence plus 10 years - the final chapter in a 20-year-old case of mistaken identity.
The Winston-Salem Police Department is among several agencies statewide to agree to new lineup procedures designed to reduce those sort of mistakes.
The police department also said recently that it would begin videotaping interviews with suspects in felony cases to help prevent coerced confessions and cut back on challenges from defense attorneys.
Another reform began in October, when a new state law took effect, requiring prosecutors to open all of their files to defense attorneys to ensure a fair trial.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys say that Hunt's case, along with a handful of other well-publicized cases of wrongful convictions, has made jurors more skeptical of police and prosecutors.
"There are two wrongs when this happens," said Roy Cooper, North Carolina's attorney general. "First, there's the moral injustice of a wrongful conviction, and second, the real criminal is still free to prey on more victims. So there is a strong imperative within the law-enforcement community that we make sure we get the right person.
Sykes, a 25-year-old newspaper copy editor, was raped and stabbed to death on Aug. 10, 1984, while walking to her job downtown at The Sentinel, the afternoon newspaper in Winston-Salem. A month after her death, police arrested Hunt, then 19, on the strength of two eyewitness identifications.
Two juries convicted Hunt, and courts upheld the conviction, even after DNA testing in 1994 showed that neither he nor either of the other two men police theorized might be involved, were the rapist. Soon after his release, Hunt was exonerated and pardoned after DNA testing identified Brown as the source of the semen evidence in the case.
In interviews this week, legal experts said that Hunt's case reveals flaws in the justice system, beginning with his mistaken identification and ending with the refusal of the appellate courts to give him a third trial after the DNA testing in 1994.
"I think we have a completely new atmosphere in the state," said Rich Rosen, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a member of the North Carolina Actual Innocence Commission. The commission was appointed in 2002 by Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake of the N.C. Supreme Court to work on reforms that might reduce wrongful conviction.
"Darryl's is one of the cases that has shaken the public confidence in the justice system, and I think it's shaken the justice system out of its complacency," Rosen said.
Hunt and many of those who supported him in his quest for justice plan to be in court today to see Brown sentenced in the crime for which Hunt served more than 18 years in prison. It was not clear this week to people close to the case exactly what Brown would say in court, which has made some of Hunt's supporters nervous.
Hunt himself declined to comment, as did Larry Little, a former city councilman who from the earliest days of the investigation took up Hunt's cause, forming a committee to help raise money and fight for his freedom.
Mark Rabil, Hunt's attorney, said that Hunt's exoneration can only be described as an affirmation of his faith.
"I would say that I never expected there to be as good an ending to the story as there has been," Rabil said.
"It was just always hard to visualize because we always ran into so many obstacles, from the courts and the police, from district attorneys,"he said. "Other attorneys were very skeptical, and most people in the community were very dubious about Darryl's innocence."
Hunt has spoken many times in the past year about his long ordeal, often moving audiences to tears with his quiet demeanor. The invitations for speaking engagements began soon after his exoneration in February by Judge Anderson Cromer of Forsyth Superior Court.
Law schools across the state asked Hunt to speak to students about his 20-year fight for justice. Then, activists pushing for a statewide moratorium on the death penalty recruited him to travel around the state with Alan Gell, another man who had been wrongfully convicted of murder. The two men spoke with civic groups in small towns and to the General Assembly about the mistakes that led to wrongful imprisonment.
Although a bill for a death- penalty moratorium died in the General Assembly last year, another reform bill, requiring prosecutors to share all their files with defense attorneys, passed the Senate unanimously and the House by a vote of 110-2.
In Hunt's case, prosecutors withheld hundreds of pages of police reports, including a two-page report of a 1986 interview with Brown, whom police had briefly considered a suspect in the Sykes killing. That report was only released to Hunt's attorneys after Brown's arrest a year ago.
Police first considered Brown a suspect in Sykes' death in 1985 after he was identified as a suspect in another downtown rape.
Rabil said that if he had known about Brown at the time, he might have been able to investigate him and solve the case years ago.
Legal experts also use Hunt's case to show how witnesses mistakenly identify suspects from photo lineups. In Hunt's case, the lead detective spent hours with a witness who eventually picked out Hunt from a stack of photographs. A second witness initially identified another man in a live lineup but later picked Hunt.
Police Chief Pat Norris announced in May that Winston-Salem police will start using procedures recommended by the Actual Innocence Commission.
The new procedures use a police officer with no knowledge of a case to administer a lineup to prevent the lead detective in the case from influencing a witness, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Norris was appointed to the commission in May and has gone further with reform efforts, recently announcing the plan to begin videotaping interrogations, a move designed to prevent coercion by police and to prevent suspects from backing off a true confession.
Hunt's case has affected the justice system in ways that are difficult to quantify but just as powerful.
Defense attorneys said they believe that Hunt's case has made jurors more skeptical of the state's evidence. David Freedman, a local defense attorney, said he intentionally brought Hunt's name up during the murder trial in March of Taron Anthony Hanes, who was charged in the beating death of a 52-year-old man.
The state had no physical evidence in the case, only the testimony from a co-defendant. The jury acquitted Hanes and two other people.
"I think Hunt opened a lot of peoples' eyes to the idea that the defendant may not be guilty just because they're charged with something," Freedman said. "Anytime the jury takes the burden of proof seriously, it's a good thing."
Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com