In less than six weeks, the Silk Plant Forest Citizen Review Committee is scheduled to present the preliminary findings of its investigation into Winston- Salem police procedure in the 1995 Jill Marker-Silk Plant Forest assault case to the Winston-Salem City Council. The presentation by the committee, which was formed by the city council in October 2007, will mark the first time a report has been issued by the nine-member citizen group. The Silk Plant Forest Citizen Review Committee will hold its next meeting Feb. 9 at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall.
On Dec. 17, 2008, the city council set a 90-day deadline for the committee’s report after former Winston-Salem police Detective Donald R. Williams, the lead investigator in the Silk Plant Forest case, failed to respond to a subpoena. The city issued a subpoena at the committee’s request after Williams refused to speak to two police detectives assisting with its investigation.
During an internal investigation into the Silk Plant Forest case by the Winston- Salem Police Department in 2007, Williams made his position clear during a recorded telephone conversation with Lt. Ted Best. “I told [Assistant District Attorney] Mary Jean [Behan], ‘I ain’t talking to the press, I ain’t talking to the police department.
I ain’t talking to nobody unless the DA wants me to come in and talk to them,”’ Williams said.
City Manager Lee Garrity threw out the police department’s internal investigation report after it came to light that Best and other officers conducting the investigation actually worked on the original investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of Kalvin Michael Smith.
After Williams failed to answer the city council’s subpoena, city attorney Angela Carmon was directed to file a motion with the court to compel Williams to testify.
As of this week, committee chairman Guy Blynn said he has no knowledge that Carmon has filed any such motion with the court.
In the coming weeks, the citizen review committee will attempt to interview and conduct polygraph examinations of a number of individuals involved in the case, Blynn said. Individuals to be interviewed include Smith, who was convicted of brutally assaulting Marker by a Forsyth County jury in 1997. On Jan. 8, Forsyth Superior Court Judge Richard L. Doughton denied Smith’s plea for a new trial. Smith is currently serving a sentence of 23 to 28 years at Albemarle Correctional Institution in New London.
The committee’s witness list also includes Kenneth Lamoureux, an early suspect in the case, and a number of current and former Winston-Salem police detectives. Blynn said the committee also plans on asking the Winston-Salem Journal for permission to speak with former reporter Phoebe Zerwick, who wrote a five-part series about the Silk Plant Forest assault case for the newspaper in 2004. Clearly, the committee has a full plate, and the chances of the nine-member panel gathering all the information it hopes to
include
in its March report appears slim at this point. This has led some
critics to wonder why it has taken the committee so long to complete
its assigned task. The 2007 city council resolution limits the scope of
the committee’s work to suggesting recommendations regarding police
procedure. The resolution states the committee “shall not make a
finding or determination of the guilt or innocence of Kalvin Smith or
any other possible suspect and shall not supplant the courts, officers
of the courts, other investigators or law enforcement agencies.”
Christine Mumma, executive director of the North Carolina
Center on Actual Innocence, said the effectiveness of any civilian
committee depends on how quickly they get their reviews done, and what
elected officials do with the information.
“It’s not so much
what the review committee comes out with — it’s what they do with it
afterwards. What we’ve seen in the past is review committees are set up
to appease people until tensions diffuse,” Mumma said. Carlton
Eversley, pastor of Dellabrook Presbyterian Church, can attest to the
tension in the Winston-Salem community surrounding the Kalvin Michael
Smith case. Eversley, who also serves as chairman of the Darryl Hunt
Project, cited a different kind of tension that has been blocking the
committee from completing its duties.
“This committee has been
in existence for nine months and they’ve been begging [Forsyth District
Attorney] Tom Keith to come but he hasn’t done that a single time. He
hasn’t responded to the people,” Eversley said. “We need a chief law
enforcement attorney who is urgently seeking the truth, and it seems to
me, Tom Keith is just the opposite. Most black people and an increasing
number of white people are tired of that.” Keith did not return calls
for this story.
Eversley pointed to Assistant District
Attorney Mary Jean Behan’s testimony during Smith’s plea hearing for a
new trial that she failed to turn over lineup photos to William Speaks,
Smith’s trial attorney, that proved Marker failed to identify Smith as
her attacker during an Oct. 31, 1996 interview with Williams. Eversley
cited the fact that neither Behan nor Keith has spoken to the citizen
review committee as evidence that a change is needed in the DA’s
office.
“Unlike the Darryl Hunt case, where Tom Keith was not
the DA for the majority of it, this is his case,” Eversley said. “This
is his baby, his Frankenstein, and he has not acted with a sense of
urgency for truth and justice. I do not feel he has moral credibility
as the leading law enforcement attorney in the county.”
Civilian
review commissions have historically been criticized for being coopted
by the group they’re reviewing and never finding in favor of the
complainant, said Anita Earls, executive director of the Southern
Coalition for Social Justice in Durham.
“What it takes is the
political will of the members of the committee and the city council,”
Earls said. “I think the same is true of every agency set up to review
police action. There is always the risk they could end up functioning
as a rubber stamp.”
During Kalvin Michael Smith’s plea hearing
last month, evidence of suppression of evidence by the Winston- Salem
Police Department and the Forsyth County District Attorney’s Office was
put forth by Smith’s attorney, David Pishko.
Also, evidence of
witnesses being coerced by police to give false testimony — as
highlighted the recantations of two of the state’s key witnesses from
the 1997 trial — and conflicting testimony offered by current and
former police detectives was offered as a basis for granting Smith a
new trial. But Judge Doughton ruled Smith failed to prove his claims.
Jet
Hollander, a supporter of Kalvin Michael Smith, said the legal hurdles
for a defendant wishing to be granted a new trial are extremely high.
Therefore, the Silk Plant Forest Citizen Review Committee could be
Smith’s last chance of getting justice.
“For years in this
case, the facts have begged to be heard,” Hollander said. “When the
truth has rung the doorbell of justice, no one’s been home. The Silk
Plant Forest Citizen’s Committee, and their two highly experienced
police detectives, are the last hope for Smith, for Jill Marker, and
for all those who value the simple virtue of telling the truth.”
Earls
said judges experience conflicting pressures in cases like Smith’s, but
no one’s interests are served when the wrong person is convicted.
“That’s
why it’s so important for the citizen review committee to perform the
function they’ve been set up to perform — in good faith, review what
evidence there may be that police officers are not doing their job
properly,” Earls said. The facts that have been uncovered since Smith’s
1997 conviction have revealed unethical behavior by both police and
prosecutors and a well-orchestrated cover-up, Hollander said. That
makes the work of the citizen review committee all the more vital to
achieving justice in Smith’s case. “The most alarming revelation is not
that a few misguided detectives concocted evidence, suborned perjury,
and committed perjury themselves,” Hollander said. “They did all that.
But, the most shocking development is the complicity of those who are
now zealously covering for them, and for themselves, thereby
undermining confidence in the honest and vital work performed everyday
by the majority of police personnel.”
Earls said it would be
fair to say the work of the Silk Plant Forest Citizen Review Committee
will have a lasting impact on the criminal justice system in Forsyth
County.
“Everyone loses when the institutions that we’ve set
up don’t perform their functions well or properly because victims have
an interest in the right person being brought to justice. It doesn’t
help victims to have the wrong person in jail and it doesn’t make any
of us any safer to have the wrong person in jail,” she said.
Kevin Hollander (far left) plays an original song in honor of Kalvin Michael Smith before an estimated crowd of 35 people during a candlelight vigil on Jan. 9 in Winston-Salem. Hollander and his father, Jet, have both appeared before the Silk Plant Forest Citizen Review Committee in the past year to speak on Smith’s behalf. The committee is charged with the task of investigating police procedure in the 1995 Jill Marker-Silk Plant Forest assault case, and is scheduled to present its findings to Winston-Salem City Council next month. (Photo by Keith T. Barber)
