Sunday, April 09, 2006
Members of a committee reviewing how Winston-Salem police investigated the 1984 murder of Deborah Sykes have decided to invite prosecutors in the case to talk with them.
The idea has been raised several times since the Deborah Sykes Citizens Administrative Review Committee began meeting last year.
It's a sensitive issue because the committee has a mandate only to examine the police role, and not how prosecutors tried and convicted the wrong man twice. Police and city officials have told the committee they also do not want the police investigators assigned to the committee to be questioning prosecutors who still handle cases with police.
At Thursday's meeting, the idea came up again. Committee members said that they needed to speak to prosecutors to be thorough in examining how police work led to Darryl Hunt.
Sykes, 25, was a copy editor at The Sentinel newspaper in Winston-Salem who was raped and killed on her way to work Aug. 10, 1984.
Hunt, 19 at the time, was charged with murder and convicted by two different juries.
Hunt was exonerated after Willard Brown, a man police had questioned 20 years ago in Sykes' murder, confessed to the crime in 2004 after the state matched his DNA with semen that was part of the evidence.
"Why are we hesitating about this?" Marcia Cole, a committee member, said during the meeting. "It's an invitation. If they come, they come. If they don't come, they don't come."
Cooperating with the committee is voluntary - it has no subpoena power. Most retired detectives and others involved in the case and related inquiries have declined interview requests.
Two former members of the department, Claire McNaught and Teresa Hicks, recently changed their minds and agreed to answer written questions.
McNaught was the police attorney from 1977 to 1999. Hicks reinvestigated the case in 1989. Among the prosecutors the committee will invite are District Attorney Tom Keith and Keith's top deputy, Eric Saunders.
Keith's office opposed a motion for a new trial in 1994, after the first DNA tests showed no match to Hunt or the two other suspects in the case.
A judge ruled that the DNA evidence likely would not lead to a different result in another trial and denied Hunt's request.
Also likely to be invited are:
Dean Bowman, who prosecuted Hunt in 1990. In his closing argument, he told jurors that Hunt raped Sykes and implied that Hunt had left semen at the scene of the rape.
Warren Sparrow, who prosecuted the second trial of Hunt for the unrelated murder of Arthur Wilson in 1983. Hunt was acquitted.
Don Tisdale, the district attorney during the Sykes murder case. He prosecuted Hunt despite misgivings about how police had handled the case.
Bowman is now with Attorney General Roy Cooper's office. Sparrow and Tisdale are in private practice.
Messages left with each lawyer were not immediately returned Friday afternoon.