The Silk Plant Forest Citizen Review Committee will meet tonight, probably for the last time, as its examination of a man's conviction in a brutal attack on a Winston-Salem store clerk in 1995 nears its finish.
Committee members will have to decide whether recent testimony by the lead detective in the case changes their earlier conclusion that they have no faith in the Winston-Salem Police Department's work on the case.
For 16 months, the committee has reviewed the city's most prominent allegation of wrongful conviction since the case of Darryl Hunt, who was exonerated in 2003 after spending nearly 19 years in prison for a killing he didn't commit.
The review committee and investigators assigned from the police department have re-interviewed witnesses from the trial of Kalvin Smith, the man convicted of beating clerk Jill Marker inside the Silk Plant Forest, a store off Silas Creek Parkway. They have uncovered new evidence to give to prosecutors and Smith's team for his legal appeals.
Smith was convicted in 1997 for the beating. He is serving 23 to 29 years in prison.
The review committee's efforts ran into several roadblocks:
□ Smith declined to take a lie-detector test unless detectives took one.
□ District Attorney Tom Keith's office said it couldn't talk about the case.
□ The police detective on the case, Don Williams, now retired, initially ignored a subpoena to testify before the committee.
□ The Winston-Salem Journal declined to provide a reporter's notes from an interview with Williams.
Also, Police Chief Scott Cunningham recently rejected the committee's request that he order two current detectives to take lie-detector tests.
"We've done as thorough a job as we could have," said Guy Blynn, the review committee's chairman.
Now members have to sign off on a final report that is intended to be made public, city officials say, but it's not clear when it might be released.
Smith asked for a new trial last year, alleging that witnesses against him were pressured by police and have since recanted.
A series of articles in the Journal raised questions about the case, and Smith has found backers in a team of students and professors at the Innocence Project at Duke University's law school.
A judge rejected Smith's request after a weeklong hearing in January. His attorneys are preparing a petition to ask a state appeals court to review that ruling.
The nine volunteers on the review committee include three lawyers, a retired minister, a Juvenile Court counselor and a social worker. Their interim report was issued in March at the request of the Winston-Salem City Council and before a judge ordered Williams, the detective, to obey a subpoena issued on the committee's behalf.
The March report stopped short of declaring the committee's belief in Smith's innocence -- which city officials had warned would violate the committee's mission --and instead said it had found no credible evidence that Smith was at the store the night of the crime.
Since March, City Attorney Angela Carmon's office has said repeatedly that it is working on releasing an edited version of the interim report in response to public-records requests, and city attorneys restated that this week.
City Manager Lee Garrity said yesterday that council members have asked that the review committee present its findings to the council's public-safety committee and the full council.
Garrity wrote in an e-mail that his intent would be to release an edited report "as quickly as possible."
Carmon said that the full report has details protected by personnel-privacy laws and that she would ask a judge to order the release of the complete version. She said that the city would start that process once the city council approves the report.
■ Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at dgalindo@wsjournal.com.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement