Darryl Hunt Research Paper

The Innocence Project Darryl Hunt was a 19 year-old African American male living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Deborah Sykes, a 25-year-old copy editor at a local newspaper. Many eyewitness misidentifications, incorrect information, and unjust actions resulted in Darryl Hunt spending 19 years of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Deborah Sykes was sexually assaulted and murdered on August 10, 1984. A call was made to alert the police of a body and the name given by the caller was Sammy Mitchell, a friend of Darryl Hunt. It was later discovered that the call was actually made by another man named Johnny Gray. During the investigation, a local man came forward and told the police

Gray and the local man were given a photo lineup and the local man identified Hunt on the first try and Johnny Gray agreed after being informed that he was their prime suspect. Hunt’s girlfriend was another informant during the investigation. She was arrested for outstanding larceny and when in custody she told police that Hunt had confessed the murder to her. She retracted her statement before trial, but her testimony was still used in court during his first trial. Other unnamed eyewitnesses testified to seeing the two together on the morning of the murder or that they saw Hunt enter a hotel and leave bloody towels behind in the bathroom. With those eyewitness testimonies, the prosecution won the case and Darryl Hunt was sentenced to life in prison. A few years into his sentence, Hunt and his attorney appealed the conviction in the North Carolina Supreme Court. Hunt won because the prosecution relied on the testimony of his girlfriend at the time, after she retracted the statement. He was released on bond in 1989 with a pending trial. The prosecution offered him a plea deal. If he’d plead guilty to murder, then he could receive time served (5

After being convicted for a second time, Darryl Hunt’s attorney joined forces with another attorney, Ben Dowling-Sendor, and the two continued to fight the previous convictions. They filed for DNA testing. They wanted the DNA found on Deborah Sykes’ body to be run against a sample of Darryl Hunt’s DNA. When the results came back in October of 1994, the results concluded that Hunt’s DNA did not match that of the sample found on Sykes’s body. Hunt and his attorney attempted to get another appeal but all attempts were shot down on the grounds that this new evidence was not enough to prove innocence. Hunt waited another 10 years for a new break in the case. In 2004, his attorneys requested that the DNA sample from Deborah Sykes’s body be run through the North Carolina state database. This time the results matched with a man who had been incarcerated on a murder charge that happened shortly after the murder of Deborah Sykes. The real killer was Willard E. Brown. He confessed to the murder shortly after the sample was matched. Darryl Hunt was exonerated and freed in 2005. With his new freedom, Darryl Hunt created a nonprofit organization. It is the Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and