Case Profiles

Kalvin Michael Smith

Kalvin Smith dressed for his court hearing last January in a new suit and shoes his father bought him for the occasion. He hadn't worn anything but prison-issued khakis and work shirts since a jury in Forsyth County, N.C., had convicted him in 1997 of the near-fatal beating of Jill Marker.

In those 12 years Smith hadn't really felt human. The new clothes helped. He was looking forward to testifying for the first time, and telling a judge that he was not the one who had beaten Marker and left her for dead. » More

Lamont McKoy

In 1991, 19-year-old Lamont McKoy was convicted in North Carolina state court for killing Myron Hailey. His conviction was based nearly entirely on the confused testimony of a known drug user who profited from cooperating with the police. However, evidence introduced in a federal court drug trial four years later suggests another man committed the murder on the other side of town. The Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility and Wrongful Convictions Clinic student investigators have collected substantial information suggesting that the federal prosecutor had it right – McKoy did not commit the murder.

More Case Profiles

A murder, two state witnesses, and two stated motives
In the early morning hours of a Saturday in October, a Central North Carolina man was found dead from a single gunshot to the head. He was a husband and a father, but he was also a known crack cocaine user and died with a crack pipe in his hand.
Significant questions in child sexual abuse conviction
It is commonly believed that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many areas in the United States, including the state of North Carolina, suffered under a period of “near-hysteria,” resulting in false accusations of child sexual abuse and mistaken prosecutions.