The Trials of Darryl Hunt is a documentary film which premiered in 2006. The topic is the US criminal justice system with special focus on a case of wrongful conviction.
Here is some basic information about it:
** Written, produced, and directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg
** Released on DVD in 2010
** Run time: 106 minutes
PART ONE
Darryl Hunt (1965-2016) was an African-American man who was a victim of a wrongful conviction. He was falsely accused and wrongfully convicted, not once but twice. According to the police and the court, he raped and killed a young white woman (Deborah Sykes) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in August 1984.
The charge was not true. Darryl maintained his innocence from the first day; in the end, he was released and exonerated. He was only 19 when he was arrested in 1984. He served almost twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
An on-screen message explains that this case evolved over twenty years, from 1984 to 2004. The filmmakers followed the case during the last ten years, i.e. from 1994 to 2004.
There is no narrator in the film. The story is carried forward by on-screen messages which marks when a new chapter of the film begins. The story is covered by old clips from news reports on television and by interviews made by the directors. The picture quality of the old footage is not high, but these clips are used because they have great historical value.
The case was covered intensely by the local media - print and television - and this coverage is frequently used in the film. In most court cases the judge does not allow anyone to take pictures or video inside the courtroom, but it seems the judge made an exception in this case. Footage from the trials is also used in the film.
More than twenty persons are interviewed in the film, including Darryl Hunt himself. I will not mention all names here, because the list is too long. I will only mention the following:
** Mark Rabil, defence attorney
** Gordon Jenkins, defence attorney
** Larry Little, Winston-Salem City Alderman
** Donald Tisdale, former district attorney of Winston-Salem
** Imam Khalid Griggs, member of the Darryl Hunt Defense Fund
** James Ferguson, defence attorney
** Ben Dowling-Sendor, appellate attorney
** Phoebe Zerwick, reporter, Winston-Salem Journal
PART TWO
As the film explains, there was no real evidence against Darryl. What the police and the prosecutor had was testimony from eyewitnesses plus the fact that the victim was a white woman, while the suspect was a black man.
It is a well-documented fact that eyewitness identification is highly unreliable, in particular when an identification has to cross a race line; when, for instance, a white person has to identify a black person. To a white person, all black men look the same. But this fact never seemed to bother the police nor the prosecutor.
Darryl was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. In 1990, his conviction was overturned on a technicality. He was released for a few months while he was waiting for a second trial.
Before the trial began, he was offered a plea bargain: if he pleaded guilty, his sentence would be converted to time served (five years) and he could walk away as a free man.
He said no. He would not plead guilty to a crime he had not committed. He wanted to have his day in court. He hoped the second trial would give him justice. He was wrong. For years, the system of North Carolina could not and would not give him justice.
As the film shows, the police and the prosecutor refused to let Darryl go, even when it became obvious that they were wrong. For years they refused to admit that they had done anything wrong.
In 1994, when DNA evidence from the case was finally tested, when the result showed that Darryl was not the perpetrator, the public prosecutor simply changed his story. Now he said Darryl could still have been present, while the crime was committed by another person, so he was still considered guilty.
In 2003, the real perpetrator Willard E. Brown was identified (using the DNA evidence) and when he was arrested, he confessed.
He had committed the crime and he had been alone.
In December 2003, Darryl was finally released but still not exonerated. This happened at a hearing in February 2004 when the case was dismissed with prejudice, which means that Darryl could never again be charged with this crime.
PART THREE
Towards the end of the film, another case from Winston-Salem is mentioned. A woman had been attacked by a black man in February 1985, only six months after the murder of Deborah Sykes, but this woman had managed to get away from her attacker.
The woman and her mother-in-law both noticed that the method used by the man appeared to be the same as in the attack on Sykes. But when the woman went to the police and told them about her suspicion, they refused to listen to her. It seems they felt they had a strong case against Darryl and they did not want this woman to disturb it. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the police knew they were wrong (or at least might be wrong) as early as 1985, when they refused to follow up on this lead.
The woman was right. The man she identified as her attacker, Willard E. Brown, was responsible for both crimes.
The name of the women is not mentioned in the film, probably in order to protect her identity. However, this protection is no longer necessary, because the woman has gone public with her case.
She wrote a book about it and in the book - which she co-authored with Linda Felker - she uses her own name: Regina Lane. The title is From Victim to Victory: The Story of Regina Lane. It was published in 2012 and reprinted in 2016.
Upon his release, Darryl decided to stay in Winston-Salem. He became active in the Innocence Project, which seeks to overturn convictions when new evidence – often DNA – shows that the first conviction was wrong. In many cases the wrong convictions are based on (unreliable) eyewitness identification.
In 2007, the city of Winston-Salem paid compensation to Darryl: 1.65 million dollars. While this is a lot of money, obviously no amount of money could restore the nineteen years he had lost while he was in prison.
About ten years after his release, Darryl faced a new problem: he learned he had cancer. And this was a battle he was not ready to fight: in March 2016, he committed suicide. It was a sad ending to a short life.
CONCLUSION
What do reviewers say about this film? Here are the results of two review aggregators:
77 per cent = IMDb
100 per cent = Rotten Tomatoes
I understand the numerous positive reviews and I agree with them. This film is a powerful document about a serious problem. I think it deserves a rating of five stars.
The mistakes made by the authorities in this case are so many and so horrible that it is hard to believe that they really happened, but they did. This case must serve as a strong warning to all law enforcement officers who think they have the right man:
** Think again and check the evidence one more time!
** You do not want to make the same mistakes as the police and the public prosecutor in Winston-Salem did when they held an innocent man in prison for almost twenty years!
PS # 1. For more information, see the following books:
** Long Time Coming: My Life and the Darryl Hunt Lesson by Jo Anne North Goetz and Leigh Somerville McMillan (2007)
** Making Justice Our Business: The Wrongful Conviction of Darryl Hunt and the Work of Faith by Stephen B. Boyd (2011)
PS # 2. The following article about Regina Lane and her book is available online: Michael Hewlett, “Writing book helped woman find closure,” Winston-Salem Journal, 19 April 2012.
PS # 3. Regarding eyewitness identification, see the following article by Jennifer Thompson: “I was certain, but I was wrong,” New York Times, 18 June 2000.
PS # 4. Picking Cotton is the title of a book by Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton, the man she misidentified as the one who had attacked her in 1984. As you can see, the title is a pun: she “picked Cotton” in a line-up at a police station. She was sure she was right, but DNA evidence later proved that she was wrong. The book was published in 2009 (hardcover) and 2010 (paperback).
PS # 5. The problem with eyewitness identification was covered by the famous news program 60 Minutes in an episode that was broadcast on 8 March 2009.
Lesley Stahl interviews Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton. The interview is available online.
For more information, see the following article:
Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld, “Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts,” Scientific American, 1 January 2010.
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Darryl Hunt (1965-2016)
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The cover of Regina Lane's book
(published in 2012, reprinted in 2016)
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