November 22, 2007
During the early 1990s, forensic scientists perfected a new technology that allowed them to compare DNA from very small or even degraded samples.
Scientists had learned to use enzymes and other chemicals to extract DNA from small amounts of blood or other human tissue found at a crime scene and copy it many times over so that it could be compared to a suspect's DNA. The technique, called polymerase chain reaction or PCR, mimicked the natural process that cells use to replicate DNA.
Defense attorneys were just beginning to understand the power of the new technology, seeing DNA as the ultimate fingerprint. All human cells contain DNA, the chemical blueprint for living things. Investigators rarely find a clean fingerprint at a crime scene. But the new technology could be used to test microscopic bits of skin from fingernail scrapings, dried saliva on a cigarette butt, drops of blood.
Or, in the case of Deborah Sykes, a 10-year-old semen sample from a cotton swab.
Here was an exact way of clearing a defendant who claimed his innocence, because no two human beings other than identical twins have the same DNA.
Sykes, a 25-year-old copy editor for The Sentinel, was found stabbed to death in a park near the newspaper's office in downtown Winston-Salem on Aug. 10, 1984. Darryl Hunt was convicted of murder in her death in 1985. That verdict was overturned on appeal and he was found guilty at a retrial in 1990 and again sentenced to life in prison.
After the second conviction, Hunt's attorneys focused on finding new witnesses in the case, people they had not been able to track down during the trial. They also tried to obtain the complete State Bureau of Investigation report that had been done in 1986, citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires the state to provide the defense with any exculpatory evidence. They didn't know yet about the latest scientific advances in DNA.
Their work started a new round of hearings, with the N.C. Supreme Court asking Judge Melzer Morgan of Forsyth Superior Court to hear testimony from the new witnesses and review the six-volume SBI report.
Tom Keith, who was elected in 1990 as district attorney, assigned his lead assistant, Eric Saunders, to represent the state. Hunt's legal team changed, too. Part of the appeal dealt with the emotional closing argument at the second trial by Dean Bowman, a special prosecutor, that defense attorney James Ferguson had let him make without objection. It would have been hard for Ferguson to handle that appeal.
So Mark Rabil was back as the attorney of record, assisted by Ben Dowling-Sendor from the state's appellate defender's office. The hearings began in June 1993, with witnesses the defense couldn't find for the trial in 1990 testifying that they heard Johnny Gray - the only state's witness to identify Hunt as the attacker - confess to his own role in the murder and rape of Sykes.
Rabil and Dowling-Sendor liked to start the day over breakfast at Sherwood Barbecue on Robinhood Road, near Rabil's home. Dowling-Sendor was waiting at the register one morning when a headline in the newspaper caught his attention. A death-row inmate in Maryland named Kirk Bloodsworth had just been cleared in the 1984 murder and rape of a 9-year-old girl. DNA testing eliminated him as the source of the semen stain in the girl's underwear, making him the first person in the nation convicted in a death penalty case to be exonerated by DNA. Dowling-Sendor and Rabil thought immediately of Hunt.
Hunt agreed without hesitation to the DNA testing. His lawyers still had to persuade Morgan. Saunders opposed their motion, arguing that PCR wasn't reliable, and it took Morgan until April 1994 to order the testing. The lawyers then spent the summer finding a lab that both sides could agree on. They settled on Roche Biomedical Laboratories, now LabCorp in Research Triangle Park.
Hunt remembers when he gave blood for the test. It was September 1994 - a full 10 years after his arrest in the Sykes murder. He was in the Harnett Correctional Institution then, nursing his latest defeat. Morgan had just rejected his motion for a new trial based on new witnesses and suppressed evidence. But at least there was enough semen left in the Sykes sample for the DNA testing. All they needed was his blood sample.
The prison nurse drew two vials of blood.
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