Darryl+Hunt

On her way home from working as a newspaper reporter, a white woman was attacked- assaulted, raped, sodomized, and fatally stabbed. Deborah Sykes, the victim, died in 1984 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, just blocks from her work place. Despite a lack of physical evidence, Darryl Hunt, an African-American man, was charged for the crimes, and was sentenced to a lifetime in jail. At just the age of 19, the prime time years of his life would be spent in jail- 10 years passing before physical evidence was found proving he did not rape in fact rape Sykes. This new evidence made it almost positive that he was innocent of the other crimes, too, but despite this he was forced to spend an additional 10 years in jail- 20 years of his life were spent in prison for a crime he didn't commit, from the age of 19-39, until he was finally let out when he was found innocent. While his case is just one of many instances of racial profiling, Darryl Hunt did something about it: He contacted HBO, told them his story, and a movie was made out of it that came out April 26th, 2007. It was called The Trials of Darryl Hunt, and "a powerful story of a miscarriage of justice that kept a black man in prison years after DNA testing cleared him of any crime" by the LA Times. He exposed the public to the horrors of racial profiling, and his terrible story in which the justice system botched up big time, causing this man to lose 20 years of his life- being punished for something he was not guilty of. He was in over 5 interviews that were published, allowing people to read, see, and witness the experience that he went through because of the horrors of racial profiling.

A scene from The Trials of Darryl Hunt, when Hunt gains his freedom, below.