BEYOND INNOCENCE

A painstaking reexamination of a miscarriage of justice and the devastating aftermath.

When the wrongly convicted walk free, headlines roar and justice seekers cheer, but what happens when the news crews depart? In her debut book, Zerwick, the director of the journalism program at Wake Forest, revisits a story she covered for the Winston-Salem Journal involving the life, arrest, trials, exoneration, and aftermath of Darryl Hunt. At 19, Hunt was a familiar face for local authorities due to a tough childhood and years of hard living. Despite having an alibi, Hunt was accused in the 1984 rape and murder of a White copy editor at the local paper. Despite the accusation, he maintained his innocence throughout. In portions of the retelling, Zerwick uses sharp prose alongside Hunt’s urgent journals to convey his thoughts and establish context. Hunt avoided the death penalty and spent the following two decades working with a devoted community and legal team to prove his innocence. His story garnered national attention in the mid-2000s after HBO released the documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt. The film ends with Hunt being released and exonerated courtesy of DNA evidence, compensated nearly $2 million in restitution, and beginning his new life, which included the founding of the Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice. However, as Zerwick deftly shows, Hunt, like many who have served prison sentences, struggled with reentry into society. Hunt’s untimely death in 2016 remains somewhat shrouded in mystery; hidden substance abuse may have been one culprit, but Zerwick posits that unacknowledged PTSD was a contributing factor. “It shouldn’t be surprising that years of wrongful imprisonment would leave those who suffer such injustice scarred,” she writes, “but the depth of these scars has only recently become a subject of research.” This moving, powerful book should lead to deeper research in that area.

An engaging, heartbreaking read that cautions society and the justice system to handle exonerees with greater care.