HILLSBOROUGH -- Lawyers for the two men accused of killing and kidnapping UNC-CH student body president Eve Carson want to know who called police with what were supposed to be anonymous tips, a request that could undermine one of law enforcement's most effective investigative tools.
On Wednesday, lawyers for Demario Atwater and Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr. argued that they need to review the Crime Stoppers information, in part to see if there are other suspects that police may have neglected. Jim Woodall, Orange County's district attorney, asked Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour to keep the information out of the lawyers' hands, saying that could create a precedent that would jeopardize how police receive information in hard-to-solve crimes.
Baddour plans on reviewing the nearly 300 pages of tips and will hold another hearing Jan. 8 before deciding whether to force Woodall to hand over information collected through the Chapel Hill Police Department's Crime Stoppers program.
Atwater, now 23, and Lovette, 19, are both facing first-degree murder charges in connection with Carson's killing.
In March 2008, Carson, 22, a senior from Athens, Ga., was found dead from five gunshot wounds in the middle of a residential Chapel Hill street near the university campus. Woodall and federal prosecutors have said she was taken from her Chapel Hill apartment and her assailants withdrew money from her bank account at several ATMs before shooting her to death.
While Atwater faces a possible death sentence, Lovette will not. He was 17, an age that the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed too young to face execution, when Carson was killed. But Lovette could spend the rest of his life in prison without a chance of parole.
Crime Stoppers is a nationwide law enforcement program in which members of the public share information about crimes. Police assure callers that the source of the information, which often results in cash rewards if the tip proves reliable, will be anonymous.
At Wednesday's hearing, Baddour heard arguments about whether he should force prosecutors and police to share Crime Stoppers tips, including a call from an unnamed tipster, Caller 412, that ultimately led to Atwater's and Lovette's arrests.
North Carolina criminal discovery laws require prosecutors to share their entire file with defendants before trial. But Woodall argued that the tipster's information should be kept secret, and warned that crimes could become tougher to solve they were not.
"It's a very important program in this state and everywhere in this country," Woodall said. "By allowing this material to simply be produced for the defense, it will identify people who gave tips in this case. It will hamstring this program."
A whodunnit, they say
Lawyers for both Atwater and Lovette said they needed to know more about the tips in order to properly represent their clients. Someone else could have killed Carson, they argued.
"The reason that Laurence Lovette is sitting here is because a tipster called Crime Stoppers, an investigator decided it was important, and followed up," said Kevin Bradley, one of Lovette's two attorneys. "Perhaps if they followed up on other information, there'd be a different person sitting here."
The information given by Caller 412 showed up in police reports, and defense attorneys already have copies, Woodall said. Woodall said there were roughly 300 pages of calls that police received in the case - more than usual but expected in a high-profile killing such as Carson's in which police called for help from the public.
None of the lawyers described in court what Caller 412 shared with police.
In addition to facing state murder charges, Atwater is also looking at a possible federal death sentence, a rarity. Because Carson died as a result of what was said to be a carjacking, that charge carries the possibility of the death penalty.
Atwater's trial on federal carjacking, kidnapping and firearms charges is scheduled for May 10 in Winston-Salem, though his attorneys have asked that it be moved out of state because of the publicity Carson's killing received.
Lovette is also one of several men accused in the January 2008 death of Abhijit Mahato, a Duke doctoral engineering student from India who was shot to death in his Durham apartment in the midst of what police think was a robbery.
Lovette attended Wednesday's hearing in the Orange County Courthouse wearing an orange Durham jail jumpsuit and waved to two family members in the courtroom. Atwater, housed in a Forsyth County prison, agreed to let his attorneys go forward with the hearing without him.
