Trials and tribulation

Darryl Hunt sat in prison for almost 20 years for a crime he didn’t commit. He was tried and retried; his case went to the Supreme Court (where his appeal was denied); and his story served and continues to serve as a microcosm of racial and class politics in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. When filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg started following his case in 1993, they had no idea their documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt would take a decade to produce.

“We think of it as a contemporary To Kill a Mockingbird,” Stern says from New York. The comparison is apt enough: Hunt, who is black, was convicted in 1984 of the brutal rape and murder of a 25-year-old white woman. The case has all the markings of the too-familiar wrongful-imprisonment stories: shoddy police work, an all-white jury, dubious eyewitness testimony (from a Klansman, no less) and a total lack of physical evidence. But Trials isn’t just about the intricacies and shortcomings of the court system. “We feel the film is so connected to the characters that you [couldn’t] care less about the criminal-justice system and be thoroughly invested in watching this movie and what happens to these people,” Stern says.

INJUSTICE SYSTEM Darryl Hunt was 19 in this 1984 mugshot; he was finally exonerated (bottom left) in 2003, and overcome with emotion at a subsequent press conference (top left).

The film’s ability to transcend the criminal justice doc tropes stems from candid interviews the filmmakers accumulated over the course of shooting. In 1993, a friend of the filmmakers’ was doing investigative work on the case and asked the two of them to come to North Carolina for a hearing he thought might lead to exoneration. When they started working on the film, neither filmmaker was convinced of Hunt’s innocence.

“We went in really not knowing,” Stern says. “It’s a horrible crime. A woman was raped and murdered; her family was devastated—who wants to invest in a movie about someone who potentially could have done this?” Even after they became convinced that Hunt had been wrongfully convicted, the case wore on for so long they wondered if they’d ever complete the film.

Sundberg says they thought about just finishing the film, even though Hunt hadn’t been acquitted: instead of waiting for justice to prevail—which they couldn’t be sure would happen—they could “make a story about injustice… But no one would fund that film. There was still a sense of maybe this guy’s really guilty.”

“If you had that kind of information—that it was going to take ten years—I don’t think anyone would embark on that kind of project,” Stern says. “But we fed off the energy of the defense. They’re filing another appeal; we’ll shoot that next scene. What else can they do [but] try to right this injustice? We went along for the ride until the Supreme Court rejected their case, and any opportunity for appeal dried up.” That was in 2000. At that point, Stern says, they didn’t think there was much hope left. “It came down to finding the murderer,” she says.

Eventually, DNA evidence pointed to the real killer, who later confessed, and Hunt was finally released. Only then did Stern and Sundberg feel they could meaningfully finish their film. “The feeling I had when [Stern] called right before [Hunt] was about to be released was, Are we ready to jump back into this?”

“We felt badly that we had embarked on this thing we didn’t finish,” Stern says. “We felt bad that we’d invested other people’s money, and especially that we had invested the hopes of the people in the film—Darryl Hunt and his attorneys. We told them we’d do something with their story. We felt guilty about it; we were disappointed in ourselves that we didn’t finish it.”

So the two took to the task of cutting down what they estimate was 400-plus hours of footage into a feature-length documentary. “The hardest thing was the amount of footage on different formats,” Sundberg says. They had footage on Super 16 film, VHS, super VHS and digital; some they had shot themselves, some they’d gotten from local news stations, and some Winston-Salem residents had taped themselves.

“It’s not a CSI kind of story,” Stern says. “There’s lost evidence, thousands of pages of [proceedings and legal documents]—it was a very messy process…. This case went on for 20 years. To get that down to an hour and 45 minutes was a challenge.” Stern admits that not every detail of the case could be covered in the film, but as it stands, Trials is a thorough, linear examination of the case. It does, however, come with a certain amount of grief. As higher and higher courts deny Hunt’s appeals, as DNA evidence that implicates another perpetrator is declared not exculpatory, as Hunt continues to sit in prison, the bafflement and frustration he and his supporters feel begins to weigh on the audience, too. “The film could have been shorter,” Stern admits, “But it was necessary to find a fine line between overkill and total boredom, and actually building the sense of, oh, my God, not again.”

Amid that righteous anger, though, is “a story of faith and perseverance, commitment, spirituality, community, race,” Stern says. “It’s a story about the human condition.”

The Trials of Darryl Hunt airs Thursday 26 at 7pm on HBO.