The Rev. John Mendez said Monday that someone put a snake in his mailbox, and that he and his family received death threats during the 19 years that he worked on Darryl Hunt's case.
"This community knows how to put pressure on you when you stand up for justice," said Mendez, the pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church. "My windows were broken, and there were lot of evil things that happened. We got letters saying, 'Go back to Africa.' "
Mendez and Stephen Boyd discussed the Hunt case and Boyd's new book, "Making Justice Our Business: The Wrongful Conviction of Darryl Hunt and the Work of Faith."
About 50 people attended the discussion at Emmanuel Baptist Church, which was presented by the church and Bookmarks, a local nonprofit group that promotes reading.
Mendez was the co-founder and chairman of the Darryl Hunt Legal Defense Committee, which was formed after Hunt was arrested in the 1984 killing of Deborah Sykes, a newspaper copy editor. Hunt was 19 at the time.
Hunt, who is now 46, was convicted of first-degree murder in Sykes' killing and served 18 years in prison before DNA evidence led to another suspect, Williard Brown, who confessed to the crime.
The Winston-Salem Journal published a series of articles in 2003 about Hunt's case that raised questions about his conviction. A lab tested DNA samples in the case, and that led investigators to identify Brown as Sykes' killer.
Boyd, a religion professor at Wake Forest University, said that series and Mendez persuaded him to get involved with Hunt's case in 2003. The articles raised doubts in Boyd's mind about Hunt's guilt.
His 118-page book about the case "was not easy to write and it's not easy to read," Boyd said.
Boyd said his book looks at the events that led to Hunt's release and how people became involved in the fight to free him.
"I ignored it for 18 years," he said. "It didn't seem to be my business. Then I realized that justice is our business."
The theological take, he said, "is everyone has something special to give."
Hunt didn't attend the discussion. He was in Raleigh for a hearing about the Racial Justice Act, which the Senate voted Monday to repeal.
DNA testing first excluded Hunt in 1994 as the rapist, but a Forsyth Superior Court judge ruled that the new evidence would not have made enough of a difference that a jury might have acquitted Hunt.
The case divided the city. Many whites believed that Hunt was guilty, while many blacks believed he was railroaded with flimsy evidence.
"It was a tragedy in many ways," Boyd said. "Deborah Sykes lost her life, and Darryl Hunt lost one-half of his life."
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