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Panel wants polygraphs in Smith case
Its goal is to sort through stories from court hearing
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Published: January 28, 2009
The chairman of a citizens committee reviewing the Kalvin Smith case said that after Smith's request for a new trial was heard in court earlier this month, one thing was clear: Accounts in the case just don't match up.
"There was a very foul odor in that hearing room," the chairman, Guy Blynn, said during Monday's meeting of the Silk Plant Forest Citizen Review Committee. "Clearly, multiple people in that hearing room were lying."
Smith's bid for a new trial was turned down by a Superior Court judge on Jan. 8.
Smith is serving 23 to 28 years for the beating of Jill Marker in December 1995 inside the Silk Plant Forest, a store off Silas Creek Parkway. The attack left Marker with permanent brain injuries, and she later went blind. Marker was pregnant at the time of the attack and gave birth to a boy while in a coma.
Smith has long maintained his innocence and has been asking for a new trial.
With his latest request denied, that leaves the citizens committee as the only active group -- until Smith's attorneys appeal the judge's ruling -- looking at the most prominent allegation of wrongful conviction in Forsyth County in recent years.
Trying to sort through the differing accounts at this month's hearing has now become one of the goals of the citizens committee in its last months of work. The committee has agreed to try to interview Smith and to re-interview former police officers and some witnesses who testified against him. It will ask all of them to agree to take a polygraph.
City Attorney Angela Carmon said at Monday's meeting that she would review what power the city has to compel current employees to take a polygraph. The committee has no power to compel anyone else to take one.
"If all would agree to a polygraph, we might be able to figure from whence the smell I noticed in the room emanated," Blynn said. "It couldn't hurt to ask."
David Pishko, Smith's attorney, said yesterday that Smith has been asked for an interview, but he has not given the committee a response yet, nor has Smith given a response about the polygraph.
Blynn's comments at Monday's meeting came as he and others acknowledged that the citizens committee is likely the last independent group that will try to uncover new facts in the case. Court appeals largely focus on the existing court record and questions of legal procedure.
"As you make your decisions, remember, you are his only chance," said Jet Hollander, one of about 20 Smith supporters at the meeting. "The justice system has not produced a just result. But with your help, we can get the ship righted."
The citizens committee has a March deadline for finishing its review. Committee members decided Monday to work on recommendations for improvements to the police department, aiming to get those to the Winston-Salem City Council by the deadline.
"It can't be that months go by and then somebody sits down to document.... You can't have things scratched out on reports without explanation provided. Records have to be placed immediately in the case files, not kept around and then lost or returned to somebody or whatever," Blynn said during discussions about what some of those recommendations might be.
A full report on the committee's investigations will take more time, committee members said, and they decided to ask the city council for an extension for that report.
The council has told the review committee to focus on police procedures and to leave determining Smith's guilt or innocence to the court system.
Blynn said yesterday that asking for polygraphs is not determining guilt or innocence but fits the committee's mission, outlined in a city-council resolution, to be an independent, comprehensive, fact-finding review.
The committee also decided Monday to look into one claim disputed at the hearing earlier this month. Pamela Moore, one of the witnesses who testified against Smith at his trial, said in her testimony in the hearing that police told her what to say.
Moore said that at one point, police stopped their recording of her statement because she didn't say what they wanted, and then re-recorded that part of her statement. Police denied that account.
It should be possible to analyze the tape to see if it is a continuous recording, or if it stops and was re-recorded where Moore indicated, Jim Coleman, a professor at the Innocence Project at Duke University's law school, told Blynn in an e-mail.
Coleman said that the Innocence Project would pay for the analysis, and the citizens committee agreed to that offer.
The Innocence Project has worked on Smith's case since 2003, developing much of the information that led to his request for a new trial.
The Winston-Salem Journal also looked at the case, publishing a five-part series in 2004 raising questions about the conviction and Marker's ability, given her brain injuries, to identify her attacker.
The citizens committee's next meeting is a work session at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 12 at City Hall.
■ Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at dgalindo@wsjournal.com.
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