Sunday, February 04, 2007
If you have followed all, or even parts, of the trials of Darryl Hunt (to steal a documentary-film title), you have probably gotten the sense that the epilogue to his nightmare is nearly finished.
Hunt, his attorneys and his supporters are looking at a pair of deadlines this week. The clock ticks simultaneously on both. A 9,000-page report from the Deborah Sykes Administrative Review Committee is scheduled to be presented to the Winston-Salem City Council on Monday night, and down the hall, city lawyers and Hunt's attorneys are negotiating a settlement to a presumed federal lawsuit that has a Tuesday filing deadline.
In theory, one has nothing to do with the other. Practically speaking, though, they are joined at the hip as Hunt anticipates getting on with the rest of his life.
The report, some say, will lay bare once and for all the breadth of the mistakes and missteps that led to Hunt's spending 18 years in prison for killing Deborah Sykes, which he had nothing to do with. A settlement, rumored to wind up somewhere between $1 million and $2.2 million, would allow all sides to move ahead.
When - and if - those things happen, they will leave just one unanswered question: Have we learned anything?
Early warnings
If we bore down deep into one of the things that went wrong early on in the investigation of Sykes' killing, the answer looks to be "no."
A good bit of the system at the Winston-Salem Police Department that led to an inexperienced, albeit well-meaning, detective being assigned as the lead investigator in the Sykes' case is still in place today.
In 1984, Jim "J.I." Daulton was a fairly new detective who worked mostly juvenile crimes. He did his level best on the Sykes case and did what he was asked to do. When things started to go very wrong, he was thrown under the bus.
Don Tisdale, the district attorney at the time, touched on the problem in a six-page letter dated Oct. 19, 1984. He described in great detail some of the errors that were made in the Sykes case (and two other cases involving other detectives), and how those errors might have been avoided had the police department assigned more experienced detectives and devoted more resources to those investigations.
"We should all be working toward the same goal, and things that have happened in the past should only serve as history for the future and as a learning tool," Tisdale wrote to acting police Chief Joseph Marsten. "If we do not learn from the past, we will be consumed by it."
Finally, some change?
In a nutshell, the system - then and now - works like this: Murder cases are assigned to detectives on a rotational basis regardless of how much experience they have. That works OK when Billy Bob stabbed his neighbor in front of 25 witnesses. It doesn't go so well when factors such as DNA testing or the more sophisticated interrogation methods required these days are considered.
Then, just when detectives have spent enough time on the job to absorb some of the tricks of the trade, they have to leave the criminal-investigations division if they want to be promoted and make more money. It's a quirk of the system here that doesn't exist in other cities.
"We need the best, most sophisticated people we can get working on major crimes," said Tom Keith, the Forsyth County district attorney. "If you're permanently assigned to investigate major crimes, what are you going to do as time goes by? Get better at it."
Sounds reasonable. At the same time, it sounds like something that should have been learned long ago.
That's a valid criticism, City Manager Lee Garrity said, and something he expects the Sykes' report to deal with. "We will have a recommendation on a career ladder that allows a person to get a pay raise within their rank," he said.
If that happens, then perhaps the city finally will be able to say it has learned and acted on something from the trials of Darryl Hunt.
© 2007 Winston-Salem Journal. The Winston-Salem Journal is a Media General newspaper.