A time for answers

The revelation almost three weeks ago that three potentially key pieces of evidence in the Kalvin Michael Smith case were apparently never sent off for testing, and the lack of answers about why that happened, should have police, prosecutors and Smith's defense team more determined than ever to get to the truth in this controversial case.

Instead, with Smith continuing to proclaim his innocence in the December 1995 beating that left Jill Marker brain-damaged, several of those involved in the case engaged in finger-pointing last week. State Bureau of Investigation officials have told the Journal that they never received the evidence. But there's reason to doubt even that contention. In the wake of evidence being withheld in a Wake County murder case in which the defendant has been exonerated, Attorney General Roy Cooper has ordered an independent review of the SBI lab.

Marker was assaulted in the Silk Plant Forest store in Winston-Salem where she worked. Smith has been imprisoned since his 1997 conviction in the assault. A Journal investigative series in 2004, the Duke Law School Innocence Project and a citizens' committee have all raised serious questions about the handling of the case by the police department and the Forsyth County District Attorney's Office, but Smith failed to persuade a judge to order a new trial.

The new evidence is a piece of cardboard from the crime scene with blood and hair on it, the clothes Marker was wearing on the night of the crime and cigarette butts that Police Chief Scott Cunningham said in a Tuesday press release were confiscated from an unnamed "person of interest" at the police department about 10 days after the crime "as a method of obtaining DNA samples from a known source." That source was apparently Kenneth Lamoureax, an early suspect in the case.

A March 3 press release from the city and Cunningham said the butts were found at the crime scene and would be sent for testing. But in the Tuesday press release, Cunningham said that no butts were found at or near the scene "according to the case file, and consistent with the recollections of involved parties." The butts won't be sent off for testing, he told the Journal last week, because "their source is known and better DNA evidence from the subject is available."

Thursday, Cunningham took full responsibility for the March 3 press release that erroneously said that cigarette butts were found at the crime scene. The mistake was made "in an effort to keep the public informed and get this information out quickly," he said in an e-mail to the Journal. He added: "But the primary focus is on the real evidence, and that will continue to be the focus." Last week, Smith gave a DNA sample at police request.

Cunningham, a former Cary police chief who took the helm here in 2008, is the first law-enforcement leader to give this case the hard review it demands. He's part of a small team that is going over the department's handling of the case to determine if it should be re-investigated. That review produced the new evidence. The cigarette butts may not be valuable to the case, but the piece of cardboard and clothes could be. They will be tested by the SBI lab and a private laboratory, LabCorp. Both labs should expedite that process. In a case in which the defendant was convicted in large part on Marker's eyewitness testimony, not on physical evidence, it's surprising that this evidence has not been tested. It might not brook any revelations. But there's the chance that it could implicate a new suspect -- or implicate Smith.

In the meantime, Cunningham needs more help. We repeat our assertion that District Attorney Jim O'Neill, who took office in December, should order his office to undertake a new review of its handling of the case. O'Neill said in an e-mail Thursday that his predecessor, Tom Keith, and David Hall, an assistant district attorney, assured him that a review they did was thorough and extensive. O'Neill noted that at a court hearing last year on the Marker case, the judge found nothing improper in the handling of the case by the district attorney, and that the judge's rulings were upheld by the N.C. Court of Appeals.

But we believe a more exhaustive review is in order. The review should ask questions such as why the DA's office heavily relied on evidence produced by lead detective Don Williams, now retired, who clearly lacked the experience and expertise for this complex case. The case has been turned over to the attorney general's office, and it should ask such questions, too.

A new city councilman, James Taylor, should demand answers as well. He was the vice chairman of the citizens' committee that reviewed the case, and said as he campaigned last year that "Based on my opinion, I feel like there was an injustice that was committed." Many people in the community share his view. It's past time for the questions in this case to be laid to rest.