Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt by Phoebe Zerwick

Atlantic Monthly Press, 330 pp.

By Rob Warden

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.”

Rob Warden is 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.