News
Email
Print
SBI Enters Marker Probe
It will play limited role at request of DA Keith
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: December 8, 2007
The State Bureau of Investigation has agreed to work on the case of Jill Marker, who was nearly killed when she was beaten in a store off Silas Creek Parkway in 1995.
The work will be done at the request of the Forsyth County district attorney, Tom Keith, who began reinvestigating the case this year after being presented with new evidence discovered by the Innocence Project at Duke University Law School.
The SBI agreed "to conduct a limited investigation into certain things connected with this case," spokeswoman Noelle Talley said in an e-mail.
Keith said last week that he had conducted interviews but wanted someone outside his office to do other interviews, including with the assistant prosecutors who handled the case, and with Kalvin Michael Smith, the man who was convicted for the beating in 1997.
Smith is serving a minimum sentence of 22 years and 10 months in prison, but he has maintained that he is innocent.
The case created tension between Keith and the innocence project, whose adviser, Jim Coleman, has said that Keith has been ambivalent toward new information that could prove Smith's innocence.
Keith said last week that he is working on the case as best he can, but no longer wants to do so with the innocence project because of Coleman's public attacks on him.
Coleman's group has been working on the case since 2003. In addition, the Winston-Salem Journal published a five-part investigation in 2004 that raised questions about many aspects of the case and Smith's conviction.
Marker was beaten on the head about 20 times with a blunt object inside the Silk Plant Forest, an artificial-plant store that she managed. Money was missing from the cash register.
The weapon was never recovered, and no physical evidence linked Smith to the crime.
He became a focus for police after a jilted girlfriend told authorities that he was responsible.
During his trial, several witnesses testified that they heard Smith say he was involved, but they later recanted and signed affidavits for the innocence project saying that the police coerced them into lying.
The new work by the SBI will be the second time that it has had some involvement on the case.
After the publication of the Journal's series, Keith asked the SBI to compare Winston-Salem police reports with reports that were given to Keith's office. The SBI found that the reports matched.
The innocence project, however, found evidence that it said was not given to Smith's trial attorney, William Speaks. Among the evidence was a videotape of a photo lineup that the lead detective in the case showed to Marker in 1996, the first time that police talked with her. In the videotape, Marker could not identify Smith as her attacker, but she identified another suspect as having been in her store. The police, however, had stopped investigating the other suspect when he moved out of town.
The issue of SBI assistance in the case has been confusing to Coleman, a law professor at Duke, who believed that Keith had committed to obtaining the SBI's assistance back in February 2006.
"If he wants to do an investigation, I've offered that we have the SBI standing by. This is cooperative," Keith said at the time.
Coleman and the law students who had investigated the case then gave Keith a long list of things they believed that the SBI should investigate.
Coleman said he never heard back from Keith.
Keith said that his 2006 request to the SBI for help was turned down.
"I did ask them, and they told me they did not have the manpower to reinvestigate the case," he said yesterday.
When asked if Keith made such a request to the SBI in 2006, Talley wrote in an e-mail: "I can confirm that members of the SBI have had discussions with the DA's office about this case. I have not been a part of those meetings but can tell you that manpower would not be the primary reason for the SBI not to accept a case."
Email
Print
