History of the Sykes case In August 1984, Deborah Sykes, a young, white, married copy editor, was raped and murdered by stabbing in the early morning about 6 am on her way to work at The Sentinel newspaper in Winston-Salem. She had recently started working there, having returned to her home state in July from the Chattanooga News-Free Press in Tennessee. Experts describe the crime as "an unusually vicious rape and murder", in which she was also sodomized and stabbed 16 times. A witness placed Sammy Mitchell and Darryl Hunt, two young African-American men, near the scene of the crime, but was not positive about the identification. Experts have criticized the way the line-up was conducted in which Hunt was identified, noting that the police officer who conducted the line-up knew Hunt was a suspect and could have influenced the witness. Secondly, in one lineup, Hunt's photo had a different background than those of other men. Police talked to Margaret Crawford, Hunt's underage girlfriend who was working as a prostitute, who changed her account several times. No physical evidence linked either man to the crime. But on September 14, the police charged Hunt with first-degree murder. The next day his arrest photo was published in the newspaper, associating him with the vicious murder. "Hunt had no record of violent crime or sexual offense at the time he became a suspect." Former FBI agent Greg McCrary, "who specializes in developing psychological profiles of sex offenders," said that usually such a violent crime as Sykes was committed by someone with a history of violence against women. In 1985 Hunt was convicted of the rape and first-degree murder of Sykes; the jury had eleven whites and one black man. (The three alternates were also white; the county's population was 25% black.) According to a later discussion by the jury foreman, members had a difficult time with the case, initially voting 7-5 in favor of guilt. Ultimately they did vote unanimously that he was guilty of first-degree murder. In the separate vote for sentencing, Hunt was spared the death penalty because none of the jurors voted for the capital sentence. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was indicted again in 1990 for the crimes against Sykes, under a new county district attorney. Mitchell was also indicted that year in Sykes' death but was never brought to trial. Warren Sparrow had defeated incumbent Donald