My three decades with Darryl Hunt.

• Author: Rabil, Mark
• Position: Revealing the Impact & Aftermath of Miscarriages of Justice

1. 2006 AT THE HOTEL HELIX: FLASHBACK TO 1984

   Darryl Hunt and I were waiting in the lounge of the Hotel Helix in Washington, D.C. to attend a screening of The Trials of Darryl Hunt, (1) a documentary about his twenty-year saga from wrongful conviction to exoneration. (2) It was the summer of 2006, well over two years after the State of North Carolina released Darryl from prison.(3) Darryl started perspiring, became agitated, and said he felt his heart was racing. As we sat, he noticed a lime green flashing light in the lounge. This lime green was the same color as the socks a reporter was wearing on September 14, 1984, the day the police put Darryl, a nineteen-year-old black kid, on display in a fenced-in area in the basement warrant office of the Forsyth County Hall of Justice in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (4) Darryl focused on those green socks while the white reporters stared at this caged black man whom they saw as the animal who raped and took the life of one of their own, the beautiful white Deborah Sykes, a copy editor for the evening paper, Twin City Sentinel. (5) He held back the tears by staring at the green socks. (6) The lime green light twenty-two years later triggered a flashback with this intense physical response for Darryl.

2. 1993: MY FOUR-YEAR-OLD'S ADVICE

   My four-year-old daughter stood in the doorway of our bedroom, hand on her hip, and gently advised me, "what you have to do is look at her sideways, and remember her the way she was." She saw that I had been crying at the bedside of her mother, distraught over Pam's confusion and pain as the cancer cells spread to her brain. Her sentences were becoming incoherent. Periodically, she screamed in pain. This was late May 1993, just a week before Pam died from breast cancer diagnosed twenty-two months earlier. In my lexicon, it was also just a few weeks before hearings in the Darryl Hunt case, hearings on whether the police had intimidated defense witnesses before his 1990 murder retrial. What did my daughter mean by her advice, "look at her sideways?"

   Even now, more than eighteen years after that day in May 1993, I struggle to discern the meaning of those words. Maybe they were simply words to soothe. Perhaps she was telling me to "see" with some sense other than my eyes. Was she tapping into the collective subconscious and suggesting that I begin to see with "the sidelong glance" of Aphrodite, or the "mind's eye" of meditators and prophets? When I found her in the tree house in the backyard later that day talking on her play phone with Pam, I thought there was some direct line of communication between the two of them, mother and daughter, a line beyond talking.

   Just a few weeks earlier, Pam was in the hospital so the doctors could drain fluid from her lungs. Finally, I began to realize that my role was not to find a cure for her cancer, but simply to be present with her, to love her. For the first twenty months of her illness, I tried to read everything I could, to question every doctor, and be a cheerleader. I was out on a run when, just out of the corner of my eye, I saw myself standing on a bridge with Pare. It was the drawbridge going onto Sunset Beach, North Carolina, our usual vacation spot. This was the spot where, as I drove onto the bridge at the beginning of the week, in my mind's eye, I envisioned myself driving back onto the mainland at the end of the week. It was a spot where time stopped. On this day in May 1993, Pam and I simply shared the space for this moment, without disease, anger, or grief. Maybe this was the meaning of my daughter's confirmatory advice, to "look at her sideways," to take the long view, to focus not on the pain before my eyes, but on the life she shared with me and our girls.

3. THE INTENTION OF THIS REFLECTION

   My daughter's advice to me has become one of several mysterious phrases and riddles that continue to haunt and inspire me. Another of these phrases was given to me by my classmate Monte Creque, in her high school valedictory speech: "Never buy shoes in the morning." (7) Since our feet expand by about a shoe size over the course of the day, we should go shoe shopping in the afternoon. Monte explained that we should not set our goals in life too soon. I believe that it also means that we should not focus on a specific outcome, as lawyers, in our cases, lest we miss the real story, yet to be revealed. Walker Percy gave similar advice in suggesting that we tour without a guidebook, lest we see only what we are told to see and miss greater sights. (8) For an attorney, not focusing on a specific outcome for a client is very hard, particularly for me as a defense lawyer in a capital case trying to save my client's life. However, I have seen time and again that such attachment to outcome, rather than focusing on the story of what happened, on the details of a client's life, can be counterproductive.

   Another phrase that follows me is one that was often repeated to me by a former law partner: "It's a long worm that never turns." My former partner learned that phrase from a corporate attorney with whom he worked in the legal department of Integon Insurance Company. He used it whenever attorneys on the other side of a case would not cooperate with us, or whenever we lost a battle in court. In other words, he used it to say, our time will come, that the tide will turn. This mantra had its origin with the character Froggy (known for the strange, guttural, frog-like sound of his voice) who said, at the end of one episode of the old television series Our Gang, "It's a long worm that never turns." Froggy, in turn, must have read the 1845 poem by Robert Browning, Flight of the Duchess, in which Browning wrote, "It's a long lane that knows no turning." (9) Browning read his Shakespeare: "The smallest worm will turn being trodden on." (10) I always thought of the "worm" in the Froggy phrase as fate, or "wyrd," symbolized by the "wyrm" or dragon fought by King Beowulf at the end of his life. (11) For now, I see the phrase as karmic: the seeds of the truth of what happened travel, and ultimately, with patience, with faith, the true story will be told. Then again, maybe Froggy's phrase is as straightforward as the old Zen koan: "How do you go straight ahead on a narrow mountain path which has ninety-three turns?" (12)

4. THE IMPLICIT HAZARDS OF THIS WORK

   My main warning here is that prosecutorial and criminal defense practice, including post-conviction, habeas, and innocence clinic work, are rife with the subconscious or implicit hazards of tunnel vision, cognitive bias, racial and ethnic prejudice, and attachment to a winning outcome. I know about these dangers in both life and law, assuming there is a dividing line. In life, I suffered some of these hazards as a caregiver for my wife: biases about cancer patients and about my--the man's--duty to provide and save from pain and suffering, and attachment to finding a cure, a "good" outcome. It is ironic that being a cancer patient caregiver and criminal defense lawyer, particularly my work in capital defense, bear similar risks. I suffered from most of these risks as I paddled the waters of pretrial, trial, appeal, and post-conviction, on behalf of one client, Darryl Hunt. Men and women who have been wrongfully convicted, like Darryl, suffer tremendously--psychologically, emotionally, and financially. Those of us who fight for the wrongfully charged or convicted suffer from different hazards.

5. THE CASE THAT WAS THE CASE FOR ME (STATE VS. DARRYL HUNT)

   On December 22, 2003, Willard Brown confessed to killing Mrs. Deborah Sykes on August 10, 1984. (13) That is, he confessed only after the police found that his DNA matched the vaginal swab from the rape kit, confronted him three days earlier, and were in the process of booking him on rape and murder charges. (14) He pled guilty in December 2004 and is serving a sentence of life plus ten years. (15) It is likely that Brown raped another woman, at the same spot where he killed Mrs. Sykes, in mid-June 1984 within a day after he was released from prison, and a third woman in January 1985 not too far away. Regina Lane identified him from an inperson lineup as her rapist in a fourth incident on February 2, 1985, which started just two blocks from where the Sykes murder happened. (16) However, the police dissuaded Ms. Lane from pressing charges because it would have called into question the case against the man they had already charged with the Sykes murder--Darryl Hunt. (17) For over nineteen years, Brown was able to keep his secret, saying, at his plea hearing on December 16, 2004: "It's part of the game, it's all been a game. The devil started it, and I played it. I just took something I can't give back."

   Darryl Hunt was twice wrongfully convicted of one of Brown's crimes, the August 1984 rape and murder of Mrs. Sykes. Throughout the years, for better or for worse, I stayed with my representation of Darryl, from the fall of 1984, through his 1985 and 1990 trials, his numerous appeals in state and federal courts, onward through his 2003 release and 2004 pardon of innocence, and eventually to his civil settlement with the City of Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 2007. I recite some of the key facts here.

   Darryl was a nineteen-year-old African-American teenager when the State charged him with Brown's crime. (18) The jury spared him the death penalty because the jury foreman at the first trial in 1985 was never convinced that he was guilty. (19) That first jury deliberated three days before returning a guilty verdict on the first degree murder charge, but only by agreeing, in advance, on a life sentence instead of death. The all-white 1990 jury (20) deliberated quickly, less than two hours, before finding him guilty. He was not facing the death penalty at the second trial, (21) which had been moved to the rural, white Catawba County, due to the extensive publicity. The judge sentenced him to life in prison. (22)

   The...