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Analyst: Statement written by Smith
Handwriting review raises issues in case
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Published: April 30, 2009
It seems like a simple question: Who wrote the statement that Kalvin Smith gave to police during their investigation of the attack on Jill Marker at the Silk Plant Forest?
A citizens committee has been reviewing the case for the past year, and recently turned its attention to the statement, in which Smith put himself at the scene of Marker's near-fatal beating in 1995.
Randy Weavil, a retired police detective, has twice testified in court that he wrote Smith's statement. But a recent handwriting analysis done at the request of the review committee indicates that Weavil is wrong and that Smith -- who says he wrote it -- is right.
For Jim Coleman, one of Smith's supporters, that finding speaks to Weavil's credibility and is a "crack in the armor" of police detectives who say that Smith willingly gave the statement in a nonconfrontational interview.
"If he's lying about that, then he's lying about other things," said Coleman, a professor at Duke University's Law School and adviser to the school's Innocence Project, which helped develop Smith's claims for a new trial.
Weavil said yesterday that he may have made a mistake in his testimony, but it was not a significant one.
"I didn't testify to a lie. I thought I wrote it," he said.
Smith's statement was never used in trial, though the possibility of prosecutors using it played a part in the decision not to have him testify in his defense, William Speaks, his defense attorney, has said.
The statement has also played a part in Smith's efforts to get a new trial. Attorneys from the N.C. Attorney General's Office argued at a hearing in January that even if witnesses in the case have recanted, the statement is still credible evidence.
Smith was convicted in 1997, and is serving 23 to 29 years, but he has maintained that he had nothing to do with the attack on Marker, a clerk at the Silk Plant Forest.
Smith claims that his conviction was the result of police pressure on him and other witnesses, a poor defense attorney at trial, and a criminal-justice system more interested in getting a conviction on shaky evidence than getting justice. He lost his bid for a new trial at the hearing in January.
At Smith's trial in 1997 and again in January, Weavil gave details about how he wrote the statement.
He said in 1997 that Smith asked him to write it, and he said during both hearings that he inserted a mistake into the statement so that Smith would correct it and put his initials next to the correction.
In the January hearing, Weavil tempered his claim and said he was "90 percent" sure that he wrote it.
Coleman said he believes that Weavil might claim to have written the statement to support lead Detective Don Williams' account Smith's interrogation. Smith's account is that Williams threatened him and his girlfriend, who was also being interviewed, with arrest and that Williams was alone with him for most of the interrogation.
Smith gave a statement saying that he was at the store and that another man, whose name he later said he made up, attacked Marker.
Eugene Littlejohn, a key witness against Smith, gave a similar statement, but he named Smith as the attacker.
Littlejohn was not charged in the case and passed a polygraph test in which he said he wasn't there when the robbery happened. At trial, he gave a new version of what happened and said he saw Smith put his hands on Marker. A deadlocked jury looked at Littlejohn's testimony just before deciding to convict Smith. Littlejohn said in January that his testimony at the trial was a lie.
In a hearing to toss out the statement before his trial, and again in the January hearing, Smith had to persuade a judge that he was telling the truth.
That's why the handwriting test is important, because it casts doubt on a basic fact that a credible officer should get right, Coleman said.
Weavil said that if the handwriting analysis changes anything, it makes the statement more incriminating for Smith to have written it.
Police Chief Scott Cunningham agreed with Weavil's point, saying that ideally suspects will always write their statements.
But if the handwriting analysis calls into question Weavil's testimony, it could give skeptics more ammunition, Cunningham said. That's why a fair review is important to finding out what happened and then improving police work, he said.
"Whenever there are flaws, intentional or unintentional, whatever the case … that gives people the opportunity to look at things with a very suspicious eye," Cunningham said.
The analysis was done by Sandy Vuncannon, a handwriting expert and a retired detective in the High Point Police Department.
Police investigators working for the committee gave Vuncannon the statement and documents written by Smith, Weavil and Williams. The statement was written in block letters, not cursive writing, making an analysis harder, but Vuncannon concluded that it was "highly probable" that Smith wrote it.
Of five possible findings indicating how certain she was, Vuncannon's conclusion was the next to the greatest amount of certainty.
Members of the review committee learned about the results at their meeting Monday night but didn't talk about them.
Committee members later discussed asking for polygraphs of current police employees who were involved in the case to test their accounts. The committee made no decisions.
Cunningham said in an interview that his department is serious in its commitment to cooperate with the review, and "in the right environment," he would be willing to compel current officers to take polygraphs.
Usually, anyone filing a complaint against an officer must pass a polygraph before the officer takes one.
Review-committee members agreed Monday to again push Smith to take the polygraph test.
Cunningham said that having Smith take a polygraph isn't necessarily a requirement before any officers would be required to take one, but he would want to hear a good reason for making an exception.
One problem he sees, Cunningham said, is that the review committee has already issued an interim report saying that it found no credible evidence Smith was at the scene of the crime.
The review committee asked the Winston-Salem City Council for more time to do more work, including waiting for a subpoena of Williams, but the council told it to write a preliminary report.
Issuing a report first, then considering asking for more polygraphs "makes it hard for officers to step in and feel like they're walking into a fair environment," Cunningham said.
Guy Blynn, the review committee's chairman, declined to respond to Cunningham's remarks.
■ Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at dgalindo@wsjournal.com.
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