News
Email
Print
Law & Order: Keith retires a champion of justice to some, an inflexible micromanager to others
Journal Photo by Bruce Chapman
Retiring District Attorney Tom Keith poses at Courtroom 6A in the Forsyth County Hall of Justice.
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: December 1, 2009
Yesterday, Tom Keith retired as Forsyth County's top prosecutor after 19 years of accomplishment -- and controversy.
Both his defenders and his detractors can agree on one thing -- Keith left a considerable stamp on his office.
But what that legacy will be is up for debate.
Supporters say Keith reduced the large backlog of felony cases he inherited when he was first elected in 1990 and aggressively lobbied for more resources for his office, increasing the number of assistant district attorneys from 11 to 25 during his administration.
From 1994 to 2007, Winston-Salem's index crime rate went down faster than any other urban city in North Carolina. And during that same period, the city went from the 12th worst crime-ridden city in the country for violent and property crime to 117th. Keith said his office convicted all but 20 of 421 murder defendants and sent more people to death row than any county in the state.
Others have a different view.
Besides his handling of two high-profile racially charged cases -- Darryl Hunt and Kalvin Michael Smith -- some say that Keith is a micromanager who sometimes slows down the criminal-justice system and hamstrings his own prosecutors.
"He's strong-minded and strong-willed, and a little unpredictable," said Nancy Wooten, a longtime criminal-defense attorney who now specializes in family law. "You never knew what to expect from that office."
Violent-crime focus
Keith wants to be remembered as someone who worked hard to get his job done. And he has no doubts about what that job was supposed to be.
"What we are trying to do here is focus on violent crimes and bring down the violent-crime rate," Keith said. "We did it. Some people don't like the way we did it. We try a lot of capital cases." Keith has also vigorously pursued as habitual felons those who commit violent crimes.
What he noticed upon taking office, he said, was that too much time was being spent in court on little cases that clogged the system. Keith worked to get rid of those cases. He handled minor traffic cases through an administrative system that took them out of traffic court. Finding that one-third of the criminal cases in district court were for worthless checks, Keith farmed the task of dealing with them to the magistrates.
Unlike his predecessors, Keith was hardly ever in the courtroom. From the moment he was elected in 1990, he was more of an administrator and lobbyist.
He went to Raleigh frequently to get more money to hire additional prosecutors and buy more equipment as well as push for tougher crime legislation. And he set his sights on reorganizing his office to reduce the thousands of felony cases he inherited.
He successfully lobbied the state legislature to increase his staff and established the Safe on Seven program in 2005, a one-stop shop of agencies for domestic-violence victims.
Keith emphasized jury trials instead of plea agreements, said Judge Judson Deramus of Forsyth Superior Court.
George Cleland, a criminal defense attorney who has known Keith for more than 20 years, said Keith brought organization to the district attorney's office. He brought a team concept and assigned some of his prosecutors to handle certain kinds of cases, allowing them to develop expertise, he said.
"That brought order to chaos," he said.
But that order had a flip side, some say, one that sometimes slowed court down and hampered assistant district attorneys.
Keith doesn't allow pleas in certain cases, such as domestic-violence, and won't let prosecutors reduce speeding charges.
Cleland said Keith would often send out a memo to his prosecutors telling them they shouldn't plea bargain in this case or reduce charges in another.
"Some small thing would get through that would capture Tom's imagination," he said. "The young assistant district attorneys are the best caliber young lawyers that the (district attorney's office) has had since I've been here. They are capable of making those decisions all by themselves. Sometimes discretion is necessary."
Keith said that the written guidelines his prosecutors follow do allow some flexibility, but they lead to "having a consistent product." That keeps defense attorneys from trying to shop around the prosecutorial staff for the best deal, Keith said.
"The genius of the law is certainty," Keith said. "There is no certainty if 25 assistants can do anything they want to do. If all (defense attorney) clients do the same thing, they will all be treated the same way."
Keith wouldn't let people enter lesser pleas to offenses that include armed robbery, drug trafficking, violence at school and driving while impaired.
There have been exceptions, Keith acknowledged. In 2008, Keith approved a dismissal of a charge of speeding 92 mph in a 65-mph zone against Walter Church Sr. of Burke County, who was then in the state legislature. Keith said at the time that he was "hoodooed" into believing that the senator's wife was suffering from a medical condition. Yesterday, Keith recalled some other cases -- such as the time a doctor claimed he was racing to the emergency room to get treatment. Later, Keith discovered it wasn't true.
Eric Saunders, who served as a senior prosecutor in Keith's office until 2007, said Keith's zero-tolerance rules are too inflexible.
"In my view, it's hard to have a zero tolerance on the different nature of defendants and facts," said Saunders, who now works as a criminal-defense attorney.
Chief Judge William Reingold of Forsyth District Court said Keith's policies sometimes force prosecutors to try cases that have weak evidence, and that takes up the court's time.
"I do not and will not judge how any elected official runs his or her department, but it has affected the courts on occasion," he said.
Reingold is right, Keith said, but he added that he doesn't have the staff to make sure every district court case is ironclad.
"You don't know you have a weak case until your witness gets on the stand," Keith said. "Our system is vastly underfunded and people want you to do everything." It is a challenge, he said, to make sure that the most violent offenders are prosecuted while not ignoring the smaller cases.
Keith has a reputation for not biting his tongue. In 1996, he had a public dispute with Judge Todd Burke, who accused Keith of not assigning him felony cases. The spat shut down court for several days.
Just days after he announced his retirement, Keith filed a motion criticizing Judge Laurie Hutchins of Forsyth District Court over her handling of a speeding ticket, saying she improperly reduced the charge in violation of state law. Hutchins fired back, comparing Keith to disgraced prosecutor Mike Nifong and accusing him of using the media to intimidate her.
The Hunt case
Keith has staked his legacy on being a law-and-order prosecutor, and he is not shy about it. He is proud of the fact that Forsyth County has sent more people to death row than any other county in the state.
Like many prosecutors, Keith sees his role as protecting the public from dangerous criminals.
But that tough stance has garnered him some criticism from some in the black community that he has shown racial bias, particularly in his handling of the cases of Darryl Hunt and Kalvin Michael Smith.
Hunt, a black man, was convicted twice, first in 1984 and then again in 1990, of raping and killing Deborah Sykes, a white copy editor for the now-defunct afternoon paper, The Sentinel. When DNA in 1994 excluded Hunt as the rapist, Keith didn't call for a reinvestigation of the Hunt case.
It was only in 2003, after DNA evidence led to another man, Williard Brown, who confessed to the crime, that Keith acknowledged that Hunt was innocent.
Smith was convicted in the 1995 beating of Jill Marker, a manager of the Silk Plant Forest store off Silas Creek Parkway. He is serving from 23 to 29 years and has maintained his innocence.
A 2004 series in the Winston-Salem Journal raised questions about the police investigation and the Winston-Salem City Council created the Silk Plant Forest Citizens Review Committee to examine the initial police investigation. Earlier this year, the committee released a final report that said it had no confidence in the police investigation.
Keith has been criticized for failing to cooperate with the committee and with Duke University's Innocence Project, which has taken up Smith's case. Keith and Jim Coleman, the Duke University law professor leading the Innocence Project, have had a public dispute over the case.
"I think the Darryl Hunt case really hurt him," said Jimmy Boyd, the president of the Winston-Salem chapter of the NAACP and a retired sergeant in the Winston-Salem Police Department.
Mark Rabil, who was Hunt's attorney and is a capital defense attorney, said the Hunt case changed Keith for the better, making him more sensitive to claims of wrongful conviction.
Keith called the Hunt case "a very sobering experience" in his career as a prosecutor, one that changed him.
In September, Keith pushed to exonerate Joseph Lamont Abbitt, after DNA proved he did not rape two teenage girls. He was exonerated after 14 years in prison.
Keith said that both capital cases and prosecutions for habitual felons are handled by a "peer review" process that includes people of "all sexes and all races."
Although peer review has been in place for some time for capital offenses, the review for habitual felons started this year.
"Peer review started this year because of the criticism we hear from the African-American community," Keith said.
Plans to carry on
Even as Keith retires, he isn't completely moving out of the spotlight.
He has said he wants to pursue permanent financing for Safe on Seven, which is losing a $400,000 federal grant. He also wants to establish a local crime lab and continue to lobby state legislators on a number of issues, including tougher punishment for gangs and strengthening drug treatment in courts.
But when he announced his retirement more than a week ago, he said he was tired and ready for something other than being district attorney.
"As soon as I get out of here and realize there's another world, I'll say to myself, ‘I should have retired sooner,'" he said.
727-7326
727-7369
Email
Print
