Carter sentenced, gets 16 to 20 years in the death of police officer

Three years ago, the lives of Keith Antoine Carter and Winston-Salem police Sgt. Howard Plouff intersected outside the Red Rooster nightclub on Jonestown Road.

Plouff had gone there in the early-morning hours of Feb. 23, 2007, to help off-duty sheriff's deputies break up fights that had spilled into the Red Rooster's parking lot.

Carter, then 22 and a senior at Winston-Salem State University, had gone to the nightclub to have a good time.

Plouff was fatally shot that morning, and yesterday, Carter was sentenced to 16 to 20 years in prison.

On Thursday, at the end of an often emotionally charged trial in Forsyth Superior Court, a jury found Carter guilty of second-degree murder in Plouff's death. He would have faced life in prison without parole if he had been convicted of first-degree murder. The jury found one aggravating factor -- that he killed a police officer who was on duty.

Judge William Z. Wood also sentenced Carter to six to eight months in prison on a count of felony engaging in a riot while in possession of a handgun. The two sentences will run consecutively, and Carter will get credit for the three years he spent in jail awaiting trial.

District Attorney Jim O'Neill said he respects the jury's verdict.

"My heart goes out to the Plouff family and, in particular, Howard's two little girls who are going to grow up without a father," O'Neill said. "I also feel very bad for Carter's family. Two families were destroyed in this senseless incident."

Moments before his sentence was announced, Carter, now 25, spoke in his defense for the first time since his arrest. Behind him sat his mother, Kim Carter. Behind her were several rows of family and friends. He told the court that he disagreed with the verdict, and then he apologized to the Plouff family.

"I'm a God-fearing man," Carter told the court, in a soft but deep voice. "I apologize to the Plouff family and their friends, and I'm sorry for your loss. And I hope that you can move on, and me and my family can move on."

Wood said that Carter had acted selfishly and that he didn't care when he went to his car, got his gun and shot into a crowd of people. The judge told Joyce Plouff, Plouff's widow, that he wished that he could give a harsher sentence, but he was limited by the law and the fact that Carter didn't have any prior convictions.

After the sentence, Kim Carter had no comment. Outside the courtroom, she spoke quietly with her family and friends who surrounded her, along with Bishop Sheldon McCarter of Greater Cleveland Avenue Christian Church, who spoke in court on Keith Carter's behalf.

Joyce Plouff spoke for more than a half-hour before the sentencing. She told the court that Carter's action had led to the loss of her husband, and that Carter should spend the rest of his life in prison.

"It was the murderer's decision to bring a gun to the club, to go drinking, to fight, to walk to his car, get out a gun, get bullets, put the clip in the gun, and to shoot at my husband, who was only trying to bring peace to a riot," she said.

Even now, Joyce Plouff said, she frequently goes back to the events of Feb. 22, 2007, when she was so rushed that she and her husband barely had time to talk. Her daughter, Brandy, had just made all-county chorus and was performing that night, and her husband wanted to show her some auto parts he had just gotten because he loved cars, she said.

She kissed her husband goodbye on the cheek, and then later, she called him because she had become lost on the way to the performance.

"I love you, babe," she told him as they hung up. Hours later, she would learn that he had been shot.

As she spoke, some of the jurors wiped away tears.

During the trial, prosecutors tried to paint a picture of the defendant as a man so consumed with anger after being beaten that he walked to his car, grabbed his gun, loaded it, and fired into a crowd seven times.

Yesterday, friends and family described a different Keith Carter -- a student at Winston-Salem State who had a 2.7 grade-point average, who worked hard and who cared for his family.

His attorney, David Freedman told the court that before this incident, Carter had been a law-abiding young man. Because of that clean record, Freedman said, Carter was able to legally buy the 9 mm handgun that authorities said was used to kill Plouff.

An uncle of Carter's, Asim Rahim Razzak, said he couldn't imagine that Carter would hurt anyone.

"I think that this young man should be given the opportunity to do what he was born to do -- to serve God and do his will," Razzak told the court.

The jury deliberated 10 hours over two days, working through lunch and taking one 15-minute break. Prosecutors had pursued first-degree murder under the felony-murder rule, in which a person is considered guilty of first-degree murder if the person committed the killing while in the commission of another felony. In Carter's case, the underlying felony was engaging in a riot. Also, prosecutors argued first-degree murder under premeditation and deliberation.

Ron Wright, a professor of law at Wake Forest University, said that strategy wasn't unusual, given the murky details of that night at the Red Rooster, which is now closed.

Although it was unusual for prosecutors to use felony engaging in a riot as the underlying felony for the first-degree murder charge, it was not risky because the felony- murder rule in North Carolina is written broadly, Wright said.

"There have been lots of cases where defendants try to limit the reach of the felony-murder rule, and the prosecution wins those arguments," he said.

Joyce Plouff declined to comment after the sentencing, but in court, she said that people frequently ask her whether she will have closure after the trial. She said she tells them that she won't.

"The reality is I know I will never be OK. There will never be closure."

mhewlett@wsjournal.com | 727-7326