PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "At the second trial, Dean Bowman, the lead prosecutor, made one of the most egregiously improper closing arguments in the annals of prosecutorial misconduct. He exhorted the jurors to imagine what Sykes had been thinking “when this man right over here” — Hunt — spread her legs apart “and raped and ravaged her and deposited some thick yellow sickening fluid in her body.” Bowman got away with it, even though he knew full well that Hunt had been excluded as the source of the so-called sickening fluid. Hunt’s second conviction was affirmed with a four-three decision of the North Carolina Supreme Court."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The HBO documentary ended on the upbeat note of Hunt’s exoneration — portraying him, in Zerwick’s words, as “the triumphant hero who had conquered an implacable system of justice through determination and faith.” That was true, but it was not the whole story, which Beyond Innocence continues and finishes — detailing, again in Zerwick’s words, “a confluence of forces Hunt could not escape: the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the false narrative of Black men as sexual predators, the violence and tenderness of his youth, the terror of a jail cell, the heartbreak of a false conviction, the long years lost to captivity, and the public pressures that came next, the full weight of which he bore until he could bear it no more.”
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REVIEW: "Beyond innocence: The life sentence of Darryl Hunt," by Phoebe Zerwick, reviewed by Rob Warden, cofounder and executive director emeritus of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and cofounder of the National Registry of Exonerations. Published by The National Book Review.
GIST: "With the addition of Beyond Innocence by Phoebe Zerwick, my personal bookshelves hold no fewer than 87 titles about wrongful convictions. Of the lot, none has made my blood boil more than Zerwick’s chronicle of the life and death of Darryl Hunt.
I’ll begin by saying of Beyond Innocence what might be said of any number of the books in my collection — that it exposes a criminal justice system devoid of justice, riddled with intellectual corruption, incompetence, racism, and arrogance, that it’s meticulously reported and eloquently written, a real page turner, journalism at its best, that it should be required reading for every legislator, prosecutor, and judge in the country.
Hunt was a Black North Carolinian twice tried for and convicted of the 1984 murder and rape of Deborah Sykes, a 26-year-old white copyeditor at the now-defunct Winston-Salem Sentinel. Some readers will find the case familiar. It was the subject of an acclaimed 2006 HBO documentary entitled “The Trials of Darryl Hunt” based in part on Zerwick’s coverage of the case for the Winston-Salem Journal in 2003.
In the face of public pressure stemming from Zerwick’s articles, prosecutors belatedly agreed to DNA testing, which they had long resisted. In 2004, the testing linked the crime to a serial rapist named Willard Brown, who pleaded guilty. The plea exonerated Hunt, to whom Brown apologized — which the police, prosecutors, and judges involved lacked the grace to do.
Like hundreds of the 3,000-plus false convictions documented nationally since the dawning of the DNA forensic age in 1989, Hunt’s case had reeked not just of reasonable doubt, but of impropriety and frameup, from the beginning.
While Hunt was awaiting trial, a young woman named Regina Lane was attacked near the scene of the Sykes murder by a knife-wielding Black man, whom she fended off. Three months later, in May 1985, Lane identified Willard Brown as her attacker from a photo array. She pointedly asked if Brown might have been the Sykes attacker, but police erroneously replied that he had been in jail at the time. Despite Lane’s positive identification, Brown was not charged.
Conventional ABO blood testing in use in the pre-forensic DNA age excluded Hunt as the source of sperm recovered from Sykes. But a state forensic witness, contravening established science, told the jury that Hunt’s blood type might have been masked by the victim’s own secretions. And the prosecution additionally theorized that Hunt might have had an unknown accomplice who could have been the source of the sperm.
When the jury found Hunt guilty, the prosecution asked for the death penalty — a fate Hunt was spared as a result of horse trading in the jury room: Initially, the jury had deadlocked, ten for and two against conviction, but the holdouts acquiesced in the conviction when the other ten agreed to a life sentence.
The conviction was overturned on appeal because the prosecution had introduced hearsay evidence and the judge had given an improper jury instruction. At that point, the prosecution offered a plea deal under which Hunt would be released for time served if he would plead guilty. He refused, professing innocence, as he had from the start. He again was convicted and, being ineligible for a death sentence because the law forbade a greater sentence than originally imposed, again sentenced to life in prison.
Both convictions rested substantially on the testimony of a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, named Thomas Murphy, who testified that he had seen a Black man with a white woman near the crime scene shortly before the crime occurred. After spending several hours over several days pouring over mug shots with a detective, Murphy identified Hunt as the man he had seen and proceeded to pick him out of a live lineup.
When asked at the first trial about his Klan affiliation, Murphy dismissed is as a youthful indiscretion fueled by alcoholism. He added, “I’ve got some of the best Black friends that there is in this city and I think as much of them as I do my white friends.”
During jury selection for both trials, prosecutors exercised peremptory challenges to disproportionately excuse Black jurors. Although the U.S. had deemed racial discrimination in jury selection illegal, it was hard to prove and remained prevalent in North Carolina. Hunt’s first jury had one Black member, but the second jury had none.
At the second trial, Dean Bowman, the lead prosecutor, made one of the most egregiously improper closing arguments in the annals of prosecutorial misconduct. He exhorted the jurors to imagine what Sykes had been thinking “when this man right over here” — Hunt — spread her legs apart “and raped and ravaged her and deposited some thick yellow sickening fluid in her body.” Bowman got away with it, even though he knew full well that Hunt had been excluded as the source of the so-called sickening fluid. Hunt’s second conviction was affirmed with a four-three decision of the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Once Willard Brown pleaded guilty, it was obvious that Hunt’s conviction could not stand. A third trial was not in the offing, since Brown could be called to the stand and would testify that he alone killed Sykes.
The HBO documentary ended on the upbeat note of Hunt’s exoneration — portraying him, in Zerwick’s words, as “the triumphant hero who had conquered an implacable system of justice through determination and faith.”
That was true, but it was not the whole story, which Beyond Innocence continues and finishes — detailing, again in Zerwick’s words, “a confluence of forces Hunt could not escape: the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the false narrative of Black men as sexual predators, the violence and tenderness of his youth, the terror of a jail cell, the heartbreak of a false conviction, the long years lost to captivity, and the public pressures that came next, the full weight of which he bore until he could bear it no more.”
For spending nearly half of his life behind bars for a crime he did not commit, Hunt received state compensation and civil settlements totaling a little more than $2.3 million — a pittance compared with, for example, the $20 million awarded in the Illinois case of Juan Rivera, who, like Hunt, had twice been convicted of a murder he did not commit, but was imprisoned only half as long.
Hunt’s settlement, as relatively paltry as it was, enabled him to start the “Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom” to help released prisoners reenter free society. In 2011, he began working for the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. In 2012, Duke University awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Sadly, Hunt fell into depression, suffering classic symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, and began using narcotics, in violation of his Muslim faith’s strict prohibition against ingesting substances capable of clouding the mind or interfering with rational thinking.
On March 4, 2016, Hunt left the home of a supporter with whom he had been staying. He was found dead nine days later in a borrowed truck of what was deemed a self-inflicted gunshot wound. What remained of his liquid assets was in in his pocket: $1.76.
Zerwick’s book, in essence, is the story of how one tragic death led to another — the first the victim of a violent sexual predator, the second the victim of grossly irresponsible police, prosecutors, and judges at all levels in North Carolina.
The lead detective on the case was demoted, but the prosecutors and judges who were equally culpable in the miscarriage of justice faced no music for violating the public trust — there was no one to prosecute the former or judge the latter.
Of all of the bad actors in the case, the worst, to my mind, was Dean Bowman, the coiffured patrician-like prosecutor whose outrageous closing argument hopelessly prejudiced the all-white jury at the second trial against the falsely charged Black defendant.
For what he did to Hunt, Bowman deserves the castigation with which Kenneth Rexroth ended one of his most memorable poems: “You killed him! You killed him. / In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit, / You son of a bitch.""
The entire review can be read at:
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: (National Registry of Exonerations: "Post-Conviction:Hunt's original trial attorney, Mark Rabil, worked on the case for nearly 20 years. After the second conviction, in which Rabil was part of a larger defense team, Rabil and another attorney, Ben Dowling-Sendor, filed for DNA testing in the case. In October 1994, DNA results came back. Hunt's DNA did not match the semen found on the victim's body at the crime scene. Despite the results, however, Hunt's appeals were rejected. Judges found that the new evidence did not prove innocence. Repeated appeals met the same fate. Exoneration: Finally, in 2003, the DNA profile from the crime scene was run in the state database, at the request of Hunt's attorneys. The results matched a man incarcerated for another murder. On Christmas Eve, 1993, Hunt was released from prison. On April 6, 2004, the charges were dismissed. Less than two weeks later, Gov. Mike Easley pardoned Hunt. In December 2004, Willard E. Brown, the man whose DNA matched the profile at the crime scene, pled guilty to the murder of Deborah Sykes. He was sentenced to life in prison.
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READ the National Registry of Exonerations entry at the link below: Summary prepared by The Innocence Project: North Carolina; DNA contributed to the exoneration; Contributing factors: Mistaken witness ID; Perjury or false accusation; Official misconduct. Up-dated on March 23, 2022.)
ENTRY: "Darryl Hunt was convicted twice of a 1984 North Carolina murder he didn't commit. After DNA results proved his innocence in 1994, it still took 10 years of legal appeals to exonerate him. The Crime In the early morning hours of August 10, 1984, Deborah Sykes, a 25-year-old copy editor at a local newspaper, was raped and murdered on the outskirts of Winston-Salem, NC. Sykes had been on her way to work; she was stabbed 16 times. She was found naked from the waist down and tests revealed that there was semen on her body, indicating that she had been raped. The Investigation and Identification A man called 911 that morning to report an attack and identified himself as Sammy Mitchell. When police talked to Sammy Mitchell the next day, they also spoke with Hunt, who was Mitchell's friend. Mitchell told police he hadn't called 911 that night. Another man, Johnny Gray, eventually told police he had made the call. A local man came forward and told police he had seen Sykes with an African-American man on the morning of the crime. When that man described a person who matched Darryl Hunt's description, police arranged a photo lineup. The witness tentatively identified Hunt as the man he had seen with Sykes. Johnny Gray had identified a different man (who was in jail on the day of the crime) in a first photo lineup, but after Hunt had been identified as a suspect, Gray identified him as well. After this, Hunt's girlfriend was arrested on outstanding larceny charges. She initially told police that she was with Hunt on the night of the crime and that he couldn't have done it. Now, under arrest, she told police that Hunt had admitted to her that he committed the crime. She recanted before trial, but prosecutors presented her statements to the jury nonetheless. The Trials Hunt was tried for first-degree murder in the Sykes case. Eyewitnesses brought forth by the prosecution testified that they had seen Hunt with the victim before the crime or that they had seen Hunt enter a local hotel and leave bloody towels behind in the restroom. Hunt testified on his own behalf that he didn’t know the victim and had nothing to do with the crime. The jury deliberated for three days. They convicted Hunt and he was sentenced to life in prison. On appeal, the North Carolina Supreme Court overturned the conviction because prosecutors had introduced Hunt's girlfriend's statements after she had recanted them. Hunt was released on bond in 1989. With the trial pending, Prosecutors offered Hunt a plea bargain – he could be freed and sentenced to time already served (five years) in exchange for a guilty plea. Hunt rejected the offer and faced a second trial. He was retried in rural Catawba County before an all-white jury. The main eyewitnesses from the first trial testified again, and two jailhouses snitches testified that Hunt had admitted guilt to them while in prison. The jury deliberated for less than two hours and convicted Hunt of first-degree murder. Again, he was sentenced to life in prison. He had been free for 11 months. Post-Conviction Hunt's original trial attorney, Mark Rabil, worked on the case for nearly 20 years. After the second conviction, in which Rabil was part of a larger defense team, Rabil and another attorney, Ben Dowling-Sendor, filed for DNA testing in the case. In October 1994, DNA results came back. Hunt's DNA did not match the semen found on the victim's body at the crime scene. Despite the results, however, Hunt's appeals were rejected. Judges found that the new evidence did not prove innocence. Repeated appeals met the same fate. Exoneration Finally, in 2003, the DNA profile from the crime scene was run in the state database, at the request of Hunt's attorneys. The results matched a man incarcerated for another murder. On Christmas Eve, 1993, Hunt was released from prison. On April 6, 2004, the charges were dismissed. Less than two weeks later, Gov. Mike Easley pardoned Hunt. In December 2004, Willard E. Brown, the man whose DNA matched the profile at the crime scene, pled guilty to the murder of Deborah Sykes. He was sentenced to life in prison. Hunt was awarded $750,000 in state compensation and settled a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Winston-Salem for $1.65 million. in 2016, Hunt died of a self-inflicted gunshot. |
| https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3314 |
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog; |
