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Last Updated: May 30th, 2008 - 11:49:13 |
The 1984 brutal rape and murder of a White newspaper editor in Winston-Salem, N.C., and the subsequent controversial conviction of a Black man, Darryl Hunt, for the crime, was the kind of Southern race drama that many had assumed belonged to the distant past. But a new, searing documentary, “The Trials of Darryl Hunt,” premiering April 26, on HBO, reminds us of how today’s legal system can operate not too differently from yesterday’s lynch mob.
Filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg spent 10 years following the case, which spilled into the era of DNA testing and was forever altered by it. While dramatic revelations of DNA tests created a final culmination for the case, Stern and Sundberg meticulously detail the legal, personal and community struggles leading up to it. First there is the actual crime. On Aug. 10, 1984, the body of Deborah Sykes, a young wife and dedicated copy editor at The Winston-Salem Sentinel, was found behind an apartment complex, not far from where she worked. She had been raped, sodomized, stabbed several times, with one fatal plunge of the knife through her heart. As Gordon Jenkins, one of Hunt’s lawyers, describes the crime, “not just anybody could commit this crime. And Darryl didn't seem to be, to me, the kind of person who could do it."
But, from the start, it seems that the Winston-Salem Police and prosecutors were intent on getting a conviction, not necessarily the perpetrator. Questionable parts of the case against Hunt included testimony from a woman diagnosed with extreme mental illness, identification of Hunt as the killer by improper means and a pivotal recording of a 911 call from a known criminal who used a false name of another criminal—a friend of Darryl Hunt—in reporting the crime. As it turned out, this particular phone call may have forever pointed police in the direction of Hunt—even at the risk of convicting the wrong man.
The creation of this narrative, through archival video and audio recordings, interviews and photographs, is no less than riveting—and heart-breaking. Though the focus is obviously on Hunt and those working for his defense, interviews with prosecutors are included, as well as with news reporters who gave the public superficial accounts of the trial with key details missing. One such detail is the fact that a prosecution witness, who offered a story of Hunt’s supposed jailhouse confession, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and received a deal of freedom for his testimony.
By including both sides, the filmmakers are able to help us understand the atmosphere surrounding Hunt’s several trials, and how Hunt’s supporters considered his ordeal a mockery of justice, while the family of Sykes considered Hunt a guilty man. [There are also, for me, interesting but unintentional parallels to the recent, dismissed rape case involving White members of Duke University’s lacrosse team and a Black exotic dancer they hired to perform. It is obviously interesting that Hunt was convicted and served time on such flimsy evidence and that the prosecutors in the Hunt case did not face the kind of legal review and possible disbarment that Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong now faces, for believing in and pursuing charges brought by the stripper.]
In addition to the legal aspects of this story, Stern and Sundberg also chronicle the human aspects of it—the anguish of grieving mothers, how a crime can divide and outrage a city, how time changes and ages an imprisoned man, how good journalism—including this documentary—can save one life and alter history.
Esther Iverem's review of "The Trials of Darryl Hunt" first appeared on www.BET.com. Please support us by ordering Esther Iverem's We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, April 2007)at Amazon.com or at your favorite bookstore. Thanks!
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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