Phoebe Zerwick - Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt — Transcript

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1. 0:00[Music]
2. 0:01foreign
3. 0:06[Music]
4. 0:18I teach journalism in writing at Wake
5. 0:22Forest University where I also direct
6. 0:24the journalism program
7. 0:26and I'm a lifelong journalist and I have
8. 0:29recently published my first book which
9. 0:31is
10. 0:32called Beyond innocence the life
11. 0:35sentence of Daryl hunt which is a story
12. 0:38that I really first learned about
13. 0:42at the very beginning of my career at
14. 0:44the Winston-Salem Journal where I
15. 0:47started in 1987.
16. 0:49Daryl hunt was a black teenager in
17. 0:54Winston-Salem North Carolina in the
18. 0:57summer of 1984. when a white newspaper
19. 1:02editor was raped and stabbed to death
20. 1:05not far from the newspaper office in
21. 1:08downtown Winston-Salem and she was white
22. 1:11and of course there was a it was a
23. 1:16terrible crime and there was um
24. 1:20it made news of course and there was a
25. 1:23tremendous amount of pressure on the
26. 1:24police department to quickly solve the
27. 1:27case a couple of witnesses had seen her
28. 1:29with a black man walking down the street
29. 1:33early in the morning on her way to work
30. 1:36and so the crime also fit
31. 1:40um this kind of myth that we have that
32. 1:43goes back to the very beginning of our
33. 1:45history in this country back to slavery
34. 1:48that white women are in danger and that
35. 1:52black men are sexual predators and so
36. 1:57that myth is has really fueled the way
37. 2:01we deal with crime in this country and
38. 2:03the hysteria around
39. 2:06attacks and rapes and murders of of
40. 2:09white women
41. 2:10and Daryl hunt very quickly became a
42. 2:13suspect through a very complex set of
43. 2:16circumstances and he was arrested and
44. 2:21wrongly convicted twice of this crime
45. 2:24there was this there was a second trial
46. 2:26and he maintained his innocence all
47. 2:29along
48. 2:30um I first started writing about the
49. 2:33case
50. 2:34um when he was still in prison and he
51. 2:38was asking for DNA testing he'd been in
52. 2:40prison by then for 19 years and my
53. 2:44newspaper assigned me to kind of try to
54. 2:47take a fresh look at this case it had
55. 2:49been in the news for 20 years by then so
56. 2:52it was a story that was well known to my
57. 2:55readers in in Winston-Salem but they um
58. 3:00my editors wanted one wanted to see what
59. 3:04we could find if we stepped back and
60. 3:06really took a fresh look at the case and
61. 3:09I ended up writing a well I ended up
62. 3:12spending almost seven months taking this
63. 3:15fresh look and I wrote a series of
64. 3:19stories investigative stories that
65. 3:22eventually led to his release from
66. 3:25prison Daryl Hunt's release and to the
67. 3:29identification through DNA testing of
68. 3:33the real killer in this case
69. 3:36yeah it was you know an incredible
70. 3:38moment for my career probably the the
71. 3:41most defining moment of my journalism
72. 3:43career I also thought okay he's out the
73. 3:47work I did helped bring about Justice
74. 3:50and you know I moved on to other stories
75. 3:54I thought I was done writing about Daryl
76. 3:56hunt
77. 3:58um I kept up with him over the years I
78. 4:01ended up leaving the newspaper and
79. 4:03started teaching at Wake Forest
80. 4:05University Daryl Hunt went on to become
81. 4:08a advocate for social justice in North
82. 4:12Carolina he founded a foundation that
83. 4:15worked with people coming home from
84. 4:17prison
85. 4:18there was a documentary made about him
86. 4:21so he became really almost certainly a
87. 4:25nationally known Advocate and really
88. 4:27internationally known Advocate and he
89. 4:31lived in Winston-Salem I would see him
90. 4:33in fact for about a year or he had
91. 4:36stepchildren I had children and his son
92. 4:39and my son went to the same elementary
93. 4:41school so I would see him driving to
94. 4:44his son to to school he'd come driving
95. 4:48down the hill and he had this bright
96. 4:50blue truck and it just looked to me like
97. 4:53he was out he was free
98. 4:56justice has been done
99. 4:58and then
100. 5:01actually we're coming up on the seventh
101. 5:03anniversary of when
102. 5:06um I got drawn back into the story
103. 5:09it's March the 5th right now so seven
104. 5:12years ago
105. 5:13um Daryl hunt was back in was in town
106. 5:18and around now he stopped answering text
107. 5:21messages phone calls he'd been staying
108. 5:24in a hotel he checked out of that hotel
109. 5:26on March the 4th and he'd gone missing
110. 5:31he was finally found on March the 13th
111. 5:35in parked at a actually right across
112. 5:39from the city's Coliseum in a kind of
113. 5:41parking lot at a at a shopping center
114. 5:45and he was dead from a gunshot wound
115. 5:50I suppose I was drawn back into the
116. 5:53story to find out what had happened why
117. 5:55had this man who seemed to have overcome
118. 5:59so much who fought for justice for 19
119. 6:01years who was out who was leading a life
120. 6:06of purpose and accomplishment
121. 6:09why why had things what what had led to
122. 6:13to his death it was within a month it
123. 6:17was ruled a suicide
124. 6:19and I just began I got my reporters
125. 6:23notebooks out and I began
126. 6:25um interviewing people trying to track
127. 6:28his final steps
128. 6:31um I learned that he was really leading
129. 6:35a kind of double life so that he had
130. 6:39begun to abuse drugs to
131. 6:42really to numb some of the psychic pain
132. 6:45that he was under and I eventually wrote
133. 6:50a magazine article that led to to this
134. 6:53book and the simple question what
135. 6:56happened really opened up a really
136. 6:59complicated
137. 7:00story about the Damage Done by wrongful
138. 7:04conviction the psychological damage the
139. 7:07Damage Done by incarceration and when
140. 7:10you couple that with being incarcerated
141. 7:13when you're not guilt when you're
142. 7:15innocent it compounds that damage the
143. 7:19Damage Done by living in solitary
144. 7:22confinement he he was in solitary
145. 7:24confinement for a total of four years
146. 7:27and then what happens when you come out
147. 7:30and you come home to a world that
148. 7:33doesn't understand what you've been
149. 7:35through and then in Daryl Hunt's case
150. 7:38there was also the Damage Done
151. 7:41to him by our system of systemic racism
152. 7:45I mean he grew up in a racist society
153. 7:49and he came home to a racist society and
154. 7:53he carried that burden with him his his
155. 7:56whole life
156. 7:58and then in his case he also had had the
157. 8:03weight of being a celebrity and so much
158. 8:06expectation on him to
159. 8:09to fight for justice and he felt that
160. 8:12that burden and um
161. 8:15and it finally caught up with him and so
162. 8:19the story
163. 8:21his story is um
164. 8:23is really a story that is shared by well
165. 8:27it's shared by the more than 3 000
166. 8:30people we've wrongly convicted in this
167. 8:32country but it's also shared by the
168. 8:35millions of people who are either
169. 8:37incarcerated now or who are out trying
170. 8:40to restart their lives
171. 8:43and live in communities that have where
172. 8:46so many people have been incarcerated
173. 8:48and there's been so much damage done by
174. 8:52this this system of mass incarceration
175. 8:55that we have in this country because we
176. 8:59um
177. 9:00we live in so much fear of crime and our
178. 9:05answer to Crime has always been to put
179. 9:09people away rather than to try to look
180. 9:13at the root causes of of crime in our
181. 9:15country and I suppose My Hope with the
182. 9:18book is that because it is a story
183. 9:22and it's a story that
184. 9:26that is the story of a really remarkable
185. 9:29man and then the remarkable people who
186. 9:32stood by him all those years and it's a
187. 9:35story that I hope transports readers
188. 9:38into a world that maybe they're not
189. 9:41familiar with into the world that Daryl
190. 9:45hunt grew up in and into the prisons
191. 9:47where he spent all those years and into
192. 9:50the experience of being denied Justice
193. 9:55all that time my hope is that through
194. 9:57this story that readers will
195. 10:01um
196. 10:01understand what our country does to so
197. 10:05many people and that people will be
198. 10:08moved to fight for justice in this
199. 10:11country
200. 10:14foreign
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