An American Injustice: The Story of Darryl Hunt

Original Air Date: March 13, 2022

In the early morning of August 10, 1984, Deborah Sykes, a 25-year-old copy editor at a local newspaper in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. Without any evidence, Darryl Hunt, a 19-year-old Black man, was implicated and convicted for Sykes murder. Although DNA evidence was found to exonerate him in 1994, he spent another 10 years in prison. The case is the subject of the 2007 HBO documentary "The Trials of Darryl Hunt."

After Hunt was finally exonerated in 2004, he started a nonprofit called the Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice which helped provide resources to individuals recently released from prison and advocated for criminal justice reform. On March 13, 2016, Hunt tragically killed himself.

To commemorate his death six years ago, we take a long look at the grave injustices in his wrongful conviction with award-winning investigative journalist, narrative writer, and college professor Phoebe Zerwick. She wrote an eight-part series for the Winston-Salem Journal in 2003 that led in part to Hunt’s exoneration, and she is the author of Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt, in which she spent years investigating and covering Hunt’s case. 

Cover of "Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt"
(Amazon)

We also speak with Suzy Salamy, the director of social work at the Innocence Project, about some of the mental health impacts of wrongful conviction and the trauma caused by racial discrimination and biases in the criminal justice system.