Sunday, March 04, 2007
It took 19 years to identify who really killed Deborah Sykes.
Figuring out how much of a factor race played in the wrongful imprisonment of Darryl Hunt could take even longer.
Last month, the city of Winston-Salem released a 103-page report with about 9,000 pages of supporting documents.
They lay out how the local justice system failed Hunt and he spent more than 18 years in prison for Sykes' murder.
The purpose of the report was to get to the truth of what happened to Hunt.
To give the public an insider's view of police conduct, the Sykes report goes as far as to include documents from the Arthur Wilson trial, a second murder for which Hunt was tried, with doodles appearing to depict monkey faces next to the names of black witnesses.
As broad as the report is, though, it is not a comprehensive investigation into racism as a possible factor in Hunt's imprisonment.
"We freely admit, we couldn't answer some of the questions," said Don Nielsen, the chairman of the Sykes Administrative Review Committee, which compiled the information in the report. He said he hopes that the report "is a building block so that people can look forward instead of backward."
Hunt spent more than 18 years in prison for the murder of Sykes, a white woman who was attacked while walking to work downtown in 1984. It wasn't until late 2003 that detectives connected DNA evidence with Williard Brown. Brown confessed to the murder and pleaded guilty in 2004. Hunt was exonerated and pardoned that year.
Interviews last month with city officials, community leaders and city residents about Hunt's wrongful conviction indicate that attitudes about race, class and injustice in Winston-Salem still vary wildly.
One simple question set off Antoinette Acker, who was interviewed outside a laundromat on Martin Luther King Drive.
She was asked whether Hunt should have gotten money from the city for his wrongful imprisonment. On Feb. 19, the city council gave Hunt $1.65 million and an apology on the same night it released the hard-edged report.
"I'm glad they gave him the money. I'm glad," Acker said, her voice growing louder. "They should have given more. They should have given him $20 million. They knew he didn't do it, but they didn't give a damn."
City Manager Lee Garrity said that today's police department is not the same as it was in 1984. For example, police detectives used different techniques to arrest a suspect in last month's fatal shooting of police Sgt. Howard Plouff, he said. "Everything about the way we do cases is different from the way we did cases from 20 years ago," Garrity said.
Creating the Sykes committee in '05
In June 2005, the Winston-Salem City Council appointed volunteers to the Sykes committee to review how the police investigated the rape and murder of Sykes, a copy editor for The Sentinel who was attacked after parking her car on West End Boulevard the morning of Aug. 10, 1984.
"I think we uncovered some big issues," said Rick Pender, a committee member. "Our goal was to put this behind us once and for all. You will always have some doubting Thomases, but I think we did present all the information that we have found."
The panel was able to piece together, like no previous internal investigation, how police detectives did not make connections between a series of rapes downtown during the same period. Evidence and witness statements taken from those rapes raise clear doubts about Hunt's involvement in the Sykes murder.
But it would have been a leap to say that police ignored those connections because of racism, committee members said. It didn't help the committee's effort, members said, that some of the former police officials involved in the case refused to talk.
"The situation with some of the police officers not willing to give their statements - that did hinder us. It made us not get into the race issue deeper," Pender said. "My opinion is, if I would have been part of that process, I would have wanted my story to be out there."
The Rev. Carlton Eversley, who has been a spokesman for Hunt, said he believes that black people should keep their guard up when it comes to dealing with the police here or anywhere in the United States.
"White people tend to presume what is on the side of the car, to protect and serve. I think if black people have any sense, they shouldn't presume it. They should hope for it and wish for it, but they are never certain if they will encounter Officer Friendly or Mark Fuhrman," Eversley said.
Mark Rabil, one of Hunt's defense attorneys, recently told a group of Wake Forest University law students that the Sykes report went far beyond what he has seen any other city do to make public its mistakes.
Where the report falls short, he said, is the report's failure to make the connection between bad police work and racism.
It's clear, he said, that prosecution witnesses used the "N" word when volunteering to testify. Even clearer for Rabil is how police detectives dropped their investigation of a white man who was a suspect in a separate series of rapes about the same time that Sykes was killed.
"What would be the best way to prove that the prosecution of Darryl Hunt was racist?" Rabil said at Wake Forest. "Well, lo and behold, this is where we see that there was."
In February 1985, Winston-Salem police arrested Larry Ray Upchurch, a white man, on accusations that he had raped a woman in her apartment on Piedmont Avenue three months earlier. Detectives already had been investigating two other rapes in the area, according to news accounts at the time.
Upchurch's accuser picked him out of a photo lineup. Blood and saliva tests later raised doubts that Upchurch had committed the crime. When the tests came back, police dropped the charges.
In Hunt's case, blood tests also raised doubts about his suspected involvement in Sykes' murder.
Lab tests run by the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation said that Hunt has Type B blood and that Sykes had Type O. "Bloodstains ... is (sic) inconsistent with both the victim's and the suspect's known blood groups," the lab report said.
The lead detective in the Sykes case, Jim Daulton, knew about the report. After it came out, he requested a blood sample from another suspect, Sammy Mitchell. In the search warrant that Daulton got to request Mitchell's blood sample, he wrote that "lab tests indicate Hunt's blood does not match blood and semen found at the scene of the crime."
The blood test, Rabil said, along with the shaky witness statements during the investigation stage, should have steered detectives in another direction and prevented the case from ever going to trial.
At Hunt's trial, the apparent blood mismatch was not enough to raise a reasonable doubt from jurors. An SBI official testified that the results were inconclusive - they couldn't definitively rule out Hunt as a suspect, because Sykes' fluids might have "masked" those left by the attacker.
The truth about why the case against Hunt continued but the Upchurch case was dropped will likely never be known. Daulton is dead. And former police officials, including some his superiors, would not talk with the Sykes committee.
Rabil said that race can be a factor in ways that might not be obvious. Cross-racial identification by witnesses tends to be unreliable. Black people tend not to describe white people well, and vice versa.
In Hunt's case, descriptions of the suspect did not originally include cornrows, a distinct hairstyle that Hunt wore. Daulton told Internal Affairs investigators in 1986 that to him, every black male was a suspect in the Sykes case.
"It shouldn't be like that," said Rabil, who is white. "They knew that all they had to do is arrest a black man. It didn't matter who it was. You just needed to make a sacrifice for the transgression."
Case as part of Winston-Salem legacy
Garrity, the city manager, said he understands how Hunt's case morphed into part of Winston-Salem's legacy.
"Certainly, there's a huge racial overlay in the community in this case. But we didn't find specific actions or mistakes or lack of judgment that would specifically point to some kind of racial bias," said Garrity, who is white.
Robert Clark, a member of the Winston-Salem City Council, put it another way.
"You're going to have a difficult time connecting the dots on that, because the ones who know anything about that won't talk to you," said Clark, who is white.
In the Sykes report, there are a series of documents from one of Hunt's two trials for the murder of Arthur Wilson; Hunt was convicted the first time, won a new trial and then was acquitted at the second trial. The documents show drawings of what appear to be monkey faces, one of them next to the name of a black, female witness. Garrity said that Bob Spillman, a former police detective, drew them in 1987, during the first of Hunt's trials in that case.
Spillman declined to speak with the Sykes committee about the drawings.
Reached by a reporter, Spillman offered only a brief comment.
"As far as I'm concerned, that's all over with," Spillman said before hanging up.
Council Member Vivian Burke, who is black, said that she remembers getting threats in the 1980s that she would be hanged downtown, and that her tongue would be cut out, if she didn't stop asking questions about the police investigation into Hunt.
"But that is what they called us back then: monkeys," she said.
"They (police) used to just walk into people's homes and put their feet on coffee tables. They were doing it to the folks and they would tell me. So I would call it to their attention," said Burke, who has been a council member since 1976.
Today, Burke is the chairwoman of the city's public-safety committee.
Burke and Council Member Joycelyn Johnson, who is also black, both said that they couldn't prove that racism was a factor in Hunt's arrest, and they said that the color of Hunt's skin wasn't the only possible factor. Class has just as much a part to play, they said, with poor people of any race or ethnicity frequently facing an uphill battle in court.
The state of North Carolina has added safeguards in the past few years to help ensure that people get fair trials. Some of the bigger changes include the creation of the Innocence Inquiry Commission last year and the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission in 2002.
As a result of recommendations by the innocence commission, the Winston-Salem police now conduct lineups by showing photos one at a time to witnesses. Those photo lineups are conducted by a police officer who doesn't know who the suspect may be. The "double-blind test" is meant to prevent a scenario in which the police officer influences the witnesses' choice.
The police department also plans to begin videotaping interviews with witnesses, another recommendation of the innocence commission. Other reforms include state legislation that requires both prosecutors and defense attorneys to share evidence to be presented at trial. The legislation gives defense attorneys more access to such evidence as witness statements and police reports.
"If somebody wants to do wrong," Garrity said, "somebody could always do something wrong. But there are a lot more checks in place today. It's a completely different department than it was 20 years ago."
In six months and again in one year, the city council is scheduled to get a report on the recommendations that have been adopted by the police department.
• Journal reporter Dan Galindo also contributed to this story.
© 2007 Winston-Salem Journal. The Winston-Salem Journal is a Media General newspaper.