November 16, 2007
November 16, 2007
Darryl Hunt packed up his things. He took his Quran, two bags of letters from friends and the most recent briefs that his lawyers had filed on his behalf. Everything else - his hair oils, deodorant and books on Islam - he gave away to fellow inmates at the Harnett County Correctional Institution. They would need them more than he would.
Hunt was going home.
It was November 1994, and though Hunt had spent almost 10 years in prison for his role in the rape and murder of a young newspaper editor, he was still only 29.
Finally, Hunt knew, he had proof that he hadn't raped Deborah Sykes on the morning of Aug. 10, 1984. The DNA report had come back a month earlier. The semen collected from her body wasn't his. Hunt could have used such evidence in court to defend himself, but DNA testing was still in its infancy at the time of his two trials.
When his lawyer called with the news, his heart jumped. Witnesses can make mistakes. They can lie. That's why he was sitting in prison on a life sentence, after all. But DNA doesn't lie. The scientists said so themselves. Here, Hunt believed, was the proof that he had been telling the truth all this time.
He hadn't raped Deborah Sykes.
He hadn't stabbed her 16 times.
"This will be the end of it," he thought.
All that was left was for a judge in Winston-Salem to overturn his conviction.
Yet despite the DNA, neither the judge nor any appellate court after him has given Hunt a new trial.
Nine years later, he's still in prison.
The case of the State of North Carolina vs. Darryl Eugene Hunt has helped define Winston-Salem's race relations for nearly 20 years, in terms that few people can ignore. Hunt is that black man the police framed because they couldn't let the murder of a white woman go unpunished. Hunt is that black man who has gotten more second chances than anyone deserves because his side played the race card.
A new generation of black leaders, people whose names still resonate in Winston-Salem today - John Mendez, Carlton Eversley, Khalid Griggs - rode the case hard. They believed in Hunt, and they feared that once he had been accused of raping a white woman he wouldn't stand a chance.
Besides its social significance, the murder of Deborah Sykes remains, at best, a partially solved crime. The person who raped Sykes, whose semen was recovered from her body, has never been found.
Three police investigations, two trials and 15 years of appellate-court review have in their own ways been limited in scope. The police focused on witnesses to the crime, the lawyers on winning strategies and the judges on the technicalities of the law.
A six-month Journal investigation examined the case against Darryl Hunt. It has found that the police used questionable tactics and relied on even more questionable witnesses to bore in on Hunt as a suspect, to the exclusion of others, and that witnesses told police what they wanted to hear. It shows how legal decisions kept piling up against Hunt, sometimes because defense tactics failed. And it reveals how the state changed its theory of the crime to fit the new DNA evidence rather than reinvestigate the case.
The original prosecutor, Don Tisdale, says today that he probably would have dropped charges against Hunt had the scientific evidence been available then. "If DNA had come back negative, I doubt very seriously I'd be trying that case," he said. But the certainty of science, not developed during either of Hunt's two trials, has yet to be accepted in his case by any court over the power of eyewitness testimony.
More than anything, Darryl Hunt's story is one tinged always by race and politics, where lines were drawn in the sand and there have remained, despite the sea of evidence washing over them from the beginning.
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