In a 2012 article, I described witnessing my Black client, Darryl Hunt, experience a posttraumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”) episode. In 2004, he was exonerated after twenty years of wrongful incarceration for the rape and murder of a White newspaper editor in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 2006, as Darryl and I sat waiting in a hotel lobby in Washington, D.C., Darryl began sweating and his heart rate began soaring. These reactions were due to the trigger of a flashing green light in the lobby. The light activated the memory of the lime green socks of a newspaper reporter on which Darryl focused to hold back tears as he, then nineteen years old, was paraded before the media when officers served him with a murder warrant in September 1984. I represented Darryl during his trials and post-conviction motions from 1984 to 2004.
There were many more PTSD triggers and episodes during Darryl’s last ten years of life, as the “moral injury” and the physical and emotional toll of wrongful incarceration, solitary confinement, four jury trials, and repeated losses in state and federal courts took their toll. Because the trauma of incarceration was repeated and continuous, Darryl suffered from “Complex PTSD,” as do many others who have been wrongfully convicted and incarcerated. Darryl became a national spokesman on issues of innocence and racial justice following the HBO documentary about his case, The Trials of Darryl Hunt. We worked as colleagues in the twelve years after his exoneration, speaking all over the country after screenings of the film to promote criminal justice reforms. At times, however, Darryl would disappear for days at a time, secretly using illegal drugs to soothe his depression, despair, and confusion.
In my 2012 article, I mentioned that “[t]hose of us who fight for the wrongfully charged or convicted suffer from different hazards” than the clients who “suffer tremendously—psychologically, emotionally, and financially.” I did not realize then that this suffering lawyers experience has a name and that there is a risk that I and others working on death penalty and innocence cases can suffer from a type of trauma similar to PTSD.In March 2016, Darryl died from a gunshot wound to his abdomen. It was ruled a suicide. Little did I know the extent of my own suffering until a few weeks after Darryl’s death. I found myself at the National Innocence Conference, staring at an indoor pool from the balcony on the eleventh floor of a San Antonio hotel, visualizing the fall. I have since learned that this state is called “secondary traumatic stress” (“STS”), which was the focus of the Wake Forest Law Review’s 2021 Spring Symposium and is a phenomenon that the legal profession has only recently begun to openly discuss.
