The New York Times

January 5, 2004

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Two days before Christmas — after nearly two decades of bungling and outrageous misbehavior — the police finally arrested the right man for the rape and murder of a woman in 1984.

But even after a DNA match and a credible confession showed conclusively that the wrong man had been locked up for the better part of 19 years, law enforcement authorities remained reluctant to let him go.

I suppose times have changed. Half a century ago, Darryl Hunt might have been lynched. Instead, he was left to rot in a cell, wrongfully incarcerated, for half his life.

Deborah Sykes was a 25-year-old white woman who was beaten, raped and stabbed to death by a black man on the morning of Aug. 10, 1984. The case was a local sensation, an accelerant in a racial atmosphere that was fiery in the best of times.

Mr. Hunt, 19 at the time, was caught in a search that can fairly be categorized as "any black man will do." Patently unreliable testimony got him convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. And after procedural problems caused the first conviction to be thrown out, he was tried and convicted again.

Mr. Hunt insisted from the beginning that he was innocent. He and his attorney, Mark Rabil, who is white, and several dedicated supporters in the black community, including a former city alderman named Larry Little, spent many long disheartening years fighting a hateful, racist system that was never interested in dispensing justice or finding the real killer.

Even after DNA tests of semen collected from Ms. Sykes's body failed to show any link to Mr. Hunt or to any of the alleged accomplices fantasized by prosecutors over the years, the courts would not intervene.

But last year an extraordinary sequence of events forced the truth into the open. In response to motions by Mr. Hunt's lawyers, a judge ordered the state to compare the DNA evidence with genetic profiles of state prisoners compiled in a DNA database. In November The Winston-Salem Journal started an eight-part series that detailed the mistakes, the unreliable witnesses, the official misconduct, the DNA evidence and many other aspects of the case.

With pressure growing, a new generation of investigators ran a broad check of the DNA. Lo and behold, the check led them to a man named Willard Brown whose DNA matched that of semen taken from Ms. Sykes. On Dec. 23 Mr. Brown was arrested and charged with kidnapping, rape, armed robbery and murder.

On Feb. 2, 1985, less than six months after the attack on Ms. Sykes, another woman was abducted, raped and, like Ms. Sykes, repeatedly stabbed. The abduction occurred just a couple of blocks from the spot where Ms. Sykes was attacked.

The second woman survived and identified Willard Brown as her attacker. But for reasons that are not at all clear, he was never prosecuted.

Mr. Brown has confessed to the rape and murder of Ms. Sykes. He said he acted alone and, according to court papers, he expressed remorse for the crime and for the many years Mr. Hunt spent in prison.

But prosecutors were still reluctant to do the right thing by Mr. Hunt. They continued to search for a way to link him to the crime.

At that point a number of prominent white voices were raised, saying essentially that enough was enough. Several white ministers held a press conference to express their dismay at the way the case had been handled.

On Christmas Eve a Superior Court judge ordered the release of Mr. Hunt on an unsecured $250,000 bond pending a hearing in February. His lawyers hope that prosecutors will agree at that point to have his murder conviction vacated.

There are many terrible things about this case. The awful attacks on at least two women. The years lost to Mr. Hunt in prison. And the fact that the relentlessly bad behavior of the law enforcement authorities — the use of unreliable witnesses, the illegal withholding of exculpatory material, the refusal to acknowledge clear evidence of innocence — is so ordinary. This sort of thing goes on all the time.

Mr. Hunt told me he was not bitter, but he did think someone should be held accountable for what happened to him. "If people feel they can get away with anything," he said, "then you will have other Darryl Hunts, from now until the end of time."