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What didn't kill Darryl Hunt made him stronger.

Imprisoned for nearly 19 years for a crime he did not commit, Hunt stared hopelessness in the face time and again and refused to give up.

But that was only the beginning. Once DNA evidence and another man's confession cleared him three years ago in the 1984 rape and murder of newspaper copy editor Deborah Sykes, Hunt dedicated his life to helping others who might be wrongfully convicted.

When I saw him during a speech at N.C. A&T two weeks ago he was a much different man from the skinny 19-year-old I interviewed in the Forsyth County Jail 23 years ago. He was shy and tentative in those days and spoke barely above a whisper. But he looked me in the eye and made it clear: "I did not do this."

At A&T he sported a neatly trimmed beard and a close haircut, and wore a sport jacket and turtleneck. He stepped forward and smiled and gave a 20-minute speech without one single note.

He cited his own life story as an example of what was wrong with the criminal justice system. He spouted statistics and rattled off in precise detail the circumstances of half a dozen present-day cases similar to his own. "This is going on everywhere,'' he said. "And any time the system fails, it affects us all."

Always smiling, never raising his voice, he revisited the pain he had suffered — the failed appeals, the taunts and death threats from prison guards. When asked by an A&T student which prison was the worst, Hunt didn't hesitate: All of them. "There aren't any good ones."

Still, he considers himself blessed. After all, he is a free man, one of the exonerated. "We are the fortunate ones," he said.

He was focused, passionate, self-assured, a far cry from the nervous teenager I'd met in 1984, with the big, puffy Afro and the faded jeans.

He now heads the Darryl Hunt Project, a nonprofit that lists three primary goals as its mission:

• to help individuals "who have been wrongfully incarcerated";

• to help ex-offenders adjust to life outside of the prison system;

• and "to advocate for change in the justice system, so innocent people won't spend time in prison."

Hunt's story is familiar to many of us now. In 1994, when DNA evidence ruled out his involvement in Sykes' rape, a judge still denied him a new trial. In 2004, investigators traced the DNA to another man, Willard Brown, who ultimately confessed to the murder. Hunt was freed in December 2004 and later received a pardon from Gov. Mike Easley.

Way back in 1984, the era of Reagan and Jehri curls, I had been the first journalist to interview Hunt. And I was nervous. We sat in a small, yellow cinderblock cubicle not a whole lot larger than a phone booth. We talked for more than three hours and I tried, over and over, to catch him in lies and inconsistencies. I couldn't.

I thought about that day when I got a chance to hug Hunt and shake his hand following his speech.

This was an odd reunion between two men who sort of knew each other but really didn't. Yes, I had been the only journalist to interview Hunt before his trial in 1984. I even had testified in his sentencing hearing.

And I had seen and spoken to Hunt since his release, but only briefly. There were always crowds of well-wishers and, well, journalists like me.

This time there was more time.

We addressed each other as if we were old friends. He joked about his supersized '80s Afro and chuckled about my vain attempts to catch him in a lie in our jailhouse interview.

He mentioned that he sees the prosecutor in his first trial, former Forsyth County District Attorney Donald K. Tisdale, almost every day. As it happens, Tisdale's law office is near Hunt's in downtown Winston-Salem. Hunt said Tisdale tends to look the other way when approaching him on the street.

Hunt said prison sets you up for failure by taking away your ability to think for yourself.

He said he thanks God every day for all the twists of fate and circumstance that kept him alive and led to his freedom. For instance, he was one juror's vote away from the death penalty in his original sentencing. He might never have lived to see DNA evidence prove his innocence.

Life is so different now for Hunt. If it was Monday, which it was, he was just getting back from Seattle. Before that, it had been Tucson. And before that, Chicago.

Still, he said, visions of prison life persist, especially at night. "I still wake up in the middle of the night and sit on the side of the bed and wait for the guard to tell me I can go to the bathroom," he said.

Darryl Hunt refuses to forget where he has been and what he has endured because he doesn't want to. And because he can't.