Tuesday, January 06, 2004
WINSTON-SALEM
Darryl Hunt heard the door to his prison cell open. He looked up and saw a captain of the guard. "You need to pack your stuff," the captain said. "You're being released in a few minutes."
It was Christmas Eve. After 19 years, two murder convictions, a number of attempts on his life, and some of the deepest disappointments he could ever have imagined, Hunt, once a free-spirited youngster and now a soft-spoken, deeply religious man, was finally being allowed to walk out of prison. DNA had come to his rescue.
Nearly two decades ago, on the morning of Aug. 10, 1984, a 25-year-old white woman named Deborah Sykes was attacked on her way to work in downtown Winston-Salem. The assailant was a black man, and the crime was incredibly violent. Sykes was beaten, raped, sodomized and stabbed 16 times. Her body was found sprawled on the grass in a small, rundown park.
It was a sensational local story, and the racial angle was pushed to the max. A great deal was made of the fact that Sykes was not just white, but tall and good-looking as well. A former Ku Klux Klansman reported seeing her with a black man in the moments before the attack, but said he hadn't realized the woman was in trouble. When he learned what had happened, he wept.
Winston-Salem was in an uproar. A black man had to be found.
The first candidate was named Terry Thomas. He was identified by an alleged eyewitness. A murder warrant was ordered and a celebratory press announcement was readied. The authorities had their man. Capital murder would be the charge.
Except for one thing. Terry Thomas couldn't possibly have done it. He was in jail when Deborah Sykes was murdered. So the search resumed. And the events that followed were clear manifestations of the cancers that have been allowed to spread throughout the criminal-justice system in the United States. The Hunt case is a tragic, two-decade study of incompetence, misconduct and racism by law-enforcement officials at every level, up to and including the judiciary.
After Terry Thomas, Darryl Hunt became a suspect. He didn't fit the initial descriptions given to the police or look like the composite drawings being circulated. But he was 19 and black, which was enough. The former Klansman - who was mentally disturbed - said yes indeed, Hunt was the man he had seen with Sykes. And the alleged eyewitness who had fingered Terry Thomas with such certainty now claimed to be equally certain about Darryl Hunt.
Hunt said he was innocent. There was no physical evidence of any kind linking him to the crime. And there were no reliable witnesses. ("For God's sake," his lawyer, Mark Rabil, exclaimed to me this week, "a Klansman was their main witness!") But Hunt was charged, and the state sought the death penalty. Prosecutors told the jury that Hunt, and Hunt alone, had attacked, raped and killed Sykes.
He was convicted in June 1985. But the jury, unsure of what had really happened, refused to impose the death penalty. Hunt was sentenced to life in prison.
Errors by the prosecution led to a new trial in 1990. This time the prosecution's story changed. Hunt had accomplices, prosecutors said - at least one, maybe two. (The alleged accomplices were never tried.) Hunt was convicted again, and again sentenced to life.
By the early '90s, it had become possible to do reliable DNA tests on the semen collected from Sykes' body. Hunt was eager to have the semen analyzed. The state was not. A judge ordered the tests, which showed that the semen could not have come from Hunt - or from the two alleged accomplices. Incredibly, that didn't matter. The judge refused to order a new trial. There was obviously a fourth man, the judge said, and he may have been an accomplice of Hunt's as well. The state liked that idea, and adopted it as its own.
Another, even weirder idea was advanced by a federal magistrate who reviewed the case. He said he couldn't exclude the possibility that "an alleged sexual pervert" had deposited the sperm after Sykes had been killed.
The authorities did not want to release Darryl Hunt under any circumstances.
Wednesday: The mystery is solved.
This is the first of two opinion columns about the Darryl Hunt case written by Bob Herbert, a columnist for The New York Times whose work is frequently published in the Winston-Salem Journal. The columns have previously appeared in the Times. The opinions are, as always, his own.