Silk Plant Forest panel has its charge, mayor says

When a member of the Silk Plant Forest citizens review committee urged the Winston-Salem City Council on Monday to do what it can to free the man imprisoned for the crime, he turned to a biblical example.

Esther, a Persian queen who hid her Jewish heritage for years, broke rules and risked her life to speak out against a decree to kill Jews, said the committee member, James Ferree, a retired minister.

"Sometimes, you have to go beyond to achieve what is just," Ferree said.

But it is not clear whether other committee members are willing to go beyond the panel's assigned mission and say that Kalvin Smith is not guilty.

Smith is serving 23 to 28 years in prison in the beating in 1995 of Jill Marker inside the Silk Plant Forest, a store off Silas Creek Parkway. Marker was pregnant at the time and was hit in the head about 20 times. She gave birth to a boy while in a coma.

Smith asked for a new trial last year, alleging that witnesses against him were pressured by police and have since recanted. A judge rejected his request after a weeklong hearing in January.

Ferree's proposal brings up a central question for the review committee -- if it finds that the case was poorly investigated, does that undermine confidence in Smith's conviction? And if so, is it the committee's role to say so?

Ferree's proposal isn't likely to be discussed until the committee's next meeting at 5:30 p.m. March 5 at City Hall.

Mayor Allen Joines repeated the position of city officials yesterday when asked about Ferree's proposal.

"I can understand an individual member reaching a personal concern about guilt or innocence, but I think that was the reason the council tried to be very clear in the charge of the committee about what its purposes are and what its purposes are not," Joines said. "I don't think there's been any equivocation on behalf of the council."

The council charged the committee with a comprehensive fact-finding review of the Smith case but told it not to draw conclusions about guilt or innocence.

Joines reminded the committee in December to focus on reviewing police policies and procedures in the case. Any new information gathered by police investigators assigned to the committee is supposed to be turned over to Smith's attorney and District Attorney Tom Keith's office.

That's the limit of the role of a city council, Joines said, "short of asking the police to open up a further investigation of the crime."

Joines said that if the review of police work indicates a clear need for police to re-examine part of the case, he would be open to considering the idea.

"I'd just have to look at what comes out of the (review committee) before I would make that determination," he said.

Ferree said after Monday's meeting that he knows the limits on the committee's mission but that citizens have a duty to speak their conscience.

"Government agencies ought to be open to hearing the truth," he said.

Two other members at Monday's meeting supported Ferree's idea that the committee has not found credible evidence to support Smith's guilt.

When asked about Ferree's proposal, Barry Lyons, a committee member who missed Monday's meeting, said, "I'm still trying to digest it, to be honest with you."

Both Lyons and committee member Miles Foy declined to comment in detail. They cited the panel's agreement to try to comment only at meetings.

Foy did say that Ferree's proposal speaks to a key challenge.

"How do we want to summarize our conclusions about the reliability of the information that the investigators collected and supplied to the court?" he said. "I think different people on the committee have slightly different views about how that should be stated or characterized."

Foy wrote a draft report with his opinion but declined to say what it was.

The draft was passed out and discussed at Monday's meeting, but it was not publicly available because City Attorney Angela Carmon said she had to review it to see if it could be released under public-records laws.

Carmon said yesterday that she would respond to a public-records request for the draft from the Winston-Salem Journal "within a reasonable time period."

The review committee's final report is due at the end of June, by which time the committee hopes that the detective in the case, Don Williams, will have testified to city council under subpoena.

■ Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at dgalindo@wsjournal.com.