So soon after his office was congratulated for treating Tolly Carr like anybody else, Forsyth County District Attorney Tom Keith suddenly has some tough questions to answer.
Here’s the short version: Jill Marker was beaten over the head 20 times in a Winston-Salem store suffering brain damage and eventually going blind. During a videotaped interview with Det. Don Williams, Marker was shown photographs of suspects and was not able to identfy Kavin Smith, the man who was eventually convicted of the crime. Williams turns the videotape and a transcript of the interview over to assistant DA Mary Jean Behan, who in turn showed defense attorney William Speaks an edited version of the video, minus the photo lineup.
The transcript never mentions the photo lineup, and Speaks says he remembers the videotape and the transcript ending at the same point. Nor did Speaks get a look at the photos Williams showed to Marker. So the question is whether or not Behan was aware of Williams’ apparent condensed version of the interview with Marker.
Duke University law professor Jim Coleman, who’s working Smith’s behalf, says he’s seen this somewhere else:
If Behan indeed watched the entire videotape – as the city’s report says – she had a constitutional obligation to get the photos that were shown in the lineup and give them to the defense, Coleman said.
“So, independent of the videotape, they had an obligation to turn over the photographs because they knew then that (police) had shown (Marker) photographs of Kalvin Smith and she couldn’t identify them. That’s exculpatory,” Coleman said.
Behan clearly filed an inaccurate notice in court in 1997 when she said that a transcript summarized the video, he said, because the transcript made no mention of the photo lineups.
“It inaccurately describes the video interview and therefore either she makes a false representation to the court or she makes a representation that she had no basis to make the representation, and that’s what Mike Nifong got nailed on,” Coleman said. “This is exactly the kind of thing that Nifong lost his license over.”
Funny how the work week evolves. This could get interesting.