Darryl Hunt (pic­tured), an exoneree and anti-death penal­ty advo­cate, was found dead in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on March 13, 2016. Hunt was wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed of the 1984 rape and mur­der of Deborah Sykes, a news­pa­per copy edi­tor. Prosecutors sought the death penal­ty against him, but he received a life sen­tence because a sin­gle juror refused to vote for death. His con­vic­tion was over­turned in 1989 and pros­e­cu­tors offered Hunt a deal for time served, in exchange for plead­ing guilty. Continuing to assert his inno­cence, Hunt refused the offer, and he was retried, con­vict­ed, and again sen­tenced to life. In 1994, a DNA test exclud­ed him as the per­pe­tra­tor of the crime, but it took anoth­er 10 years of appeals before he was released in 2004. After his exon­er­a­tion, Hunt became an out­spo­ken oppo­nent of the death penal­ty. Steve Dear, exec­u­tive direc­tor of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, said, ​“I think every­one who saw Darryl speak was deeply moved by the resilience and kind­ness and gen­tle­ness with which he spoke.” But Hunt was firm about the dan­gers of the death penal­ty, say­ing: ​“A sys­tem that can per­pe­trate an injus­tice like this has no busi­ness decid­ing life and death. If I had got­ten a death sen­tence, there’s no doubt in my mind, I would have been exe­cut­ed.” Hunt’s case was cov­ered in an eight-part series in the Winston-Salem Journal and was the sub­ject of a doc­u­men­tary film, The Trials of Darryl Hunt, both of which were crit­i­cal of the racial bias and offi­cial mis­con­duct that con­tributed to his wrongful conviction.

(L. Bonner, ​“Darryl Hunt, wrong­ly con­vict­ed of mur­der, found dead,” The Charlotte Observer, March 13, 2016; ​“Darryl Hunt,” North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.) See Innocence.

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