The Trials of Darryl Hunt

Darryl Hunt was tried and convicted in 1984 of raping and killing young Deborah Sykes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Hunt doggedly proclaimed his innocence then and throughout the nearly 20 years that he was incarcerated. The trial generated a great deal of racial tension in the Southern community; Hunt is black, Sykes was white, and the jury that convicted him was nearly all white. A second trial in 1989 also resulted in a guilty verdict, but in 1994, DNA testing became reliable enough to prove that Hunt was innocent of the rape. The North Carolina court nonetheless refused to admit this evidence. It was in 1994 that filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg began documenting THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT. The result is a thorough and painful condemnation of the American court system, where racism and slipshod police work sometimes prevail, and where local judges and attorneys, and even the news media, are often motivated by political expedience. –BB