November 21, 2007
By 1990, there weren't many people in Forsyth County who had not heard of Darryl Hunt and Deborah Sykes.
Some people thought of Hunt as the guy who had gotten away with murder because black activists had raised a ruckus. Others believed that he was a victim of a racist system, framed twice - once for Sykes' death and the second time in the murder of another man, Arthur Wilson, at an illegal drink house - all because the state wouldn't let the death of a white woman go unpunished.
Six years' worth of publicity had put Hunt's lawyers in a bind as they prepared for his retrial in Sykes' stabbing death.
The demographics in Forsyth County worked in Hunt's favor because he would have a chance of getting some black jurors to hear the case. But that logic had failed before. At his first trial, the district attorney excused all but one black juror. The same thing had happened with the first trial in the Wilson case.
So Hunt's lawyers had to weigh whether to allow the retrial to proceed in Forsyth County or to request a change of venue.
Moving the trial could be risky. There was no requirement that Hunt be tried in an urban county, where the black population might be similar to Forsyth County, and little precedent for such a move anyway. Judges generally moved trials to a contiguous county. Although Guilford County is contiguous to Forsyth, the courtrooms there were already crowded. That left only rural counties, where the black population is low and jurors would be more likely to identify with Sykes than with a poor black man of the streets.
Hunt's attorneys decided to take a chance.
Hunt had a new defense team, led by a star civil-rights and criminal lawyer from Charlotte named James Ferguson. Ferguson had made a name for himself in the 1970s representing the Wilmington 10 - nine men and one woman who spent eight years in prison for firebombing a grocery store, before a federal appeals court overturned their convictions in 1980.
Larry Little, the former Winston-Salem alderman who led Hunt's defense committee, knew Ferguson from Little's days as a Black Panther and recruited his firm to handle Hunt's appeal. Ferguson supports his civil-rights work with a lucrative personal-injury practice, which is how he and his partner, Adam Stein, were able to put hundreds of hours into defending Hunt long after the court-appointed-attorney fees ran out.
In June 1990, the defense filed a motion asking the court to move Hunt's retrial to another urban county - Durham, Wake or Mecklenburg - where the racial makeup is similar to Forsyth's. They argued that Hunt would not get a fair trial with an all-white jury.
In theory, it was a sound argument, but Hunt's own recent court history weakened it. The same defense team, which received a change of venue for the retrial in the Wilson murder, had won Hunt's acquittal with an all-white jury in Newton, a small town outside Hickory, and the county seat of Catwaba County.
In asking the court to move the Wilson trial to an urban county, Ferguson made the same argument about racial makeup of the jury pool that he would later make in the Sykes case. Judge James J. Booker, who heard the motion in the Wilson case, checked with court officials in Raleigh, Durham and Fayetteville, but no one had room for another trial. Catawba County was the only place where the case could be heard in a reasonable time, so that's where the Wilson retrial was held in March 1990.
The Wilson case, however, was much different. It involved a black victim, an older man, who was beaten to death in a robbery outside an illegal drink house. And there were all those questionable witnesses who said they had seen Hunt at the drink house that night with Sammy Mitchell. Police Detective Randy Weavil had worried about those witnesses when he investigated the case, knowing that they would be easy targets for an aggressive defense attorney.
Pat Eaton of Catawba County, the jury foreman in the Wilson case, confirmed Weavil's fears. He said in a recent interview that the verdict was simple for the panel.
"We weren't going to believe the word of these two ladies who were admitted drunks and said they were drunk the night they saw him (Hunt)," he said.
Hunt's acquittal didn't give Ferguson any more confidence in Catawba County for the Sykes retrial. It was one thing to try a black man accused of beating another black man in front of an all-white jury and quite another to try a black man accused of raping and stabbing a white woman.
The state appointed Judge Forrest Ferrell to hear the Sykes case and the change-of-venue request. Ferguson told him that court officials in Mecklenburg County said they would have space for the trial by September. Dean Bowman, the prosecutor from Surry County assigned to the case, said that court officials in the urban counties told him they were all booked up, and he asked that it be heard in his home county, where the black population was half that even of Catawba. Ferrell said recently he didn't think that was fair, but he didn't give much weight to the racial arguments Ferguson made either.
The decision came down to something simple. Ferrell lived in Catawba County. He liked it there. "The state's lawyers wanted it moved to somewhere like Mount Airy or somewhere with less population, so I said, 'Let's move it where I know the defendant can get a fair trial,'" Ferrell said. "Catawba County in my opinion has a reputation for rendering fair and impartial verdicts."
Ferrell's decision was final, and with that ruling Ferguson's lucky streak was over. He had won two appeals for Hunt and an acquittal in the second Wilson trial, but none of Hunt's supporters had much hope of getting an acquittal in Newton in the Sykes murder.
It wasn't just the racial dynamics of the case that worked against Hunt in Newton. The Surry County prosecutors, Bowman and James Yeatts, were right at home there, but the defense team never fit in with the Newton crowd as easily.
"They could have perceived Ferguson as this big-city lawyer, uppity, trying to be smart," said the Rev. John Mendez, a Hunt supporter. "This was a good-old-boy, good-old-country jury, with Bowman coming out of a similar environment."
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