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Williams agrees to face council
Journal photo by David Rolfe
Don Williams (left), a retired Winston-Salem police detective, confers with attorney Carl Parrish during the hearing in Forsyth Superior Court.
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Published: April 10, 2009
Don Williams, a retired Winston-Salem police detective, appears to have given up his fight against a subpoena from the Winston-Salem City Council that calls on him to answer questions about his work in the 1995 Silk Plant Forest case.
After a judge rejected his arguments against the subpoena in a hearing yesterday in Forsyth Superior Court, Williams' attorney, Carl Parrish, said he would not appeal.
"We're going to show up," Parrish said.
If Williams follows through on that promise, it would be a marked change. Williams refused to testify before a citizens committee reviewing the case and ignored the council subpoena in December. When the city sent him another subpoena last month for a court hearing, Williams retained attorneys who filed papers the Friday before the hearing asking Judge Edgar B. Gregory, among other requests, to disband the citizens review committee.
Gregory said no, and he ruled that the subpoena was properly issued and had to be obeyed.
He also refused Williams' requests for a gag order on the citizens committee or for an order blocking the review committee from making a finding on the guilt or innocence of Kalvin Michael Smith, the man who was convicted of brutally assaulting Jill Marker, a clerk at the Silk Plant Forest store. Smith has maintained his innocence, but he failed to persuade a judge in January that he should get a new trial, even though key witnesses against him testified that the police had coerced their testimony.
The review committee was appointed by the city council to study the work of the police in investigating the crime. Its mission is spelled out in city-council resolutions that specifically tell the committee that it cannot make a finding of guilt or innocence. "I decline to do that and feel it is not necessary," the judge said.
Williams has been given documents produced by the review committee, and Gregory said he would not grant Williams' request for all questions to be presented to Williams in advance.
"I give the city council ... the benefit of the doubt that their questions will be in accordance with the specific purposes set forth in their resolutions."
Gregory's rulings did not deal with disagreements about the review committee's mission, and Parrish said that if questions are asked beyond what he believes the mission is, he will tell Williams not to answer them.
Once Gregory's order is signed, 30 days must pass before a hearing for Williams can be set. It appears that the earliest that Williams could testify would be in late May. Al Andrews, a city attorney, said that he and Parrish would negotiate a hearing date in the coming weeks.
One legal issue remained unresolved in yesterday's hearing. Gregory gave Williams' attorneys 30 more days to find some legal cases supporting their request to have the city pay Williams' legal fees.
The council formed the review committee in the wake of continued questions about the crime, its investigation and Smith's guilt. Smith was convicted in 1997, and is serving 23 to 29 years in prison. Marker was struck in the head repeatedly during the attack as she worked at the Silk Plant Forest, a store off Silas Creek Parkway. Marker was pregnant at the time of the attack, and later gave birth to a son while in a coma. Today, she is living in Ohio, where she is blind and requires 24-hour care.
The city council, in creating the committee last year, said that the committee was to do a comprehensive, independent review of the case with a focus on police policies and procedures.
Parrish has argued that the review has to be limited to whether policies were followed. He said he asked for the gag order and to limit making documents public after reading that the review committee said in an interim report that it found no credible evidence Smith was at the Silk Plant Forest on the night of the crime.
"Why do they want to talk to my client for?" Parrish asked. "They've already made up their mind."
Williams is among several people who have refused to an interview with the committee, but he was the only one subpoenaed.
Kenneth Lamoureux, an early suspect in the case, would not agree to an interview. Committee members have said that they also are hampered by the Winston-Salem Journal's refusal to let former reporter Phoebe Zerwick be interviewed about Williams' quotes in the newspaper's 2004 series. In the article, Williams said he did not document some of his work in order to keep it from Smith's defense attorney
The series raised questions about the work of police and prosecutors, as well as that of Smith's defense attorney during his trial. The Journal has said that it stands behind the accuracy of the stories.
Since 2003, Smith's case also has been taken up by the Innocence Project at Duke University's law school.
The review committee had asked to submit its report only after Williams' testimony. The council told it to produce a report, with the option of adding to any testimony later. The committee filed its interim report last month and has until June 30 to finish it.
■ Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at dgalindo@wsjournal.com.
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