March 14, 2016

Darryl Hunt, imprisoned for more than 19 years for a murder he did not commit, was found dead in a car in Winston-Salem early Sunday.

“In 1984 at age 19, Hunt was charged with the rape and murder of a newspaper copy editor….” Read more here.

“Hunt was exonerated in 2004 after DNA evidence led police to Willard Brown, who confessed to the killing, and pardoned by then-Gov. Mike Easley.” Read more here.

He was awarded a settlement of more than $1.6 million in 2007 and founded the Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice,  an advocacy group for the wrongfully convicted.

“But Hunt was also haunted by his experiences, said those who knew him. He would use ATMs daily, not so much to get money but so he could create a time-stamped receipt and an image recording his location.” Read more here.

“The trauma of wrongful convictions, years in prison, and the responsibilities he took on after he was free wore Hunt down, (his longtime attorney, Mark Rabil) said.

“ ‘In the long run, he eventually got the death penalty,’ Rabil said.” Read more here.

– From “Darryl Hunt, wrongly convicted of murder, found dead” by Lynn Bonner in the News & Observer (March 13)

Exoneration – what a beautiful word. Misleadingly beautiful for those who forever bear the wounds of wrongful conviction.

In 2007 a New York Times study of 137 DNA exonerees showed that “most of them have struggled to keep jobs, pay for health care, rebuild family ties and shed the psychological effects of years of uestionable or wrongful imprisonment.

Another study suggests New York state parolees experienced “a 2-year decline in life expectancy for each year served in prison.”

Perhaps most chilling: Darryl Hunt surely ranked as one of exoneration’s most heartening success stories.

April 19, 2014

“Is it possible to so modify child forensic interviewing that the sorts of errors described by Ceci and Bruck are minimized?…

“The primary problem is that most prosecutors and most so-called mental health professionals do not stay current….

“How likely, for instance, is it that a copy of ‘Jeopardy in the Courtroom’ will be found on your favorite prosecutor’s desk?”

– From “A Review of a Review of ‘Jeopardy in the Courtroom’ by Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck” at falseallegations.com

May 29, 2016

“It’s easy to whip people into a frenzy over a moral panic (such as ‘satanic ritual abuse’ in the 1980s). All you do is tell people there’s a vast segment of humanity that wants to prey on their children. You tell them that these predatory people aren’t like us – they’re outsiders with different values. And you make sure that the talking heads on TV keep the story alive.

“Is it possible that a moral panic could happen today?

“Just ask Gov. Pat McCrory, who has cost his state millions of dollars defending a law that allegedly protects North Carolina children from transgender bathroom-goers – a statewide crisis that suddenly popped into existence during an election year, conveniently enough.

“Moral panics still exist, and they’re still absurd. The only difference is, they’re a lot more expensive than they were back in the ’80s.”

– From “History warns us to beware of ‘moral panic’ ” by Ben R. Williams in the Martinsville (Va.) Bulletin (May 27)

March 21, 2015

I spent several hours Friday at Duke University Law School listening to experts detail “Evolving Trends in Forensic Science.”

Fascinating. Topics ranged from the effects of sleep deprivation on jurors’ decision-making to the use of cell tower evidence to determine suspect location. But I was wedged into an auditorium otherwise full of lawyers to hear pediatrician Cynthia Brown and defense attorneys Mark Montgomery and Lisa Miles outline the latest standards for medical exams in cases of suspected child abuse. The good news – if you’re being wrongfully prosecuted in 2015 – is that those standards have become dramatically more specific and sophisticated.

If, however, you were wrongfully prosecuted in 1987, then the fruits of that scientific progress remain maddeningly out of reach.  Waiting for me when I returned home Friday was a letter from Junior Chandler:

“April 15 will be 28 yrs – nearly half my life, all because of lies when I did no crime. It’s a shame & disgrace to the whole N.C. justice system, not only to do this but never to be willing to say they were wrong….”