Elon University alumna Lindsey Guice Smith ’05 appeared this month on MSNBC’s “News Nation with Tamron Hall” to speak of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission’s efforts in freeing two men from prison who were exonerated for murder.
Kenneth Kagonyera and Robert Wilcoxson served a decade in prison after pleading guilty to the killing of a 51-year-old victim, a plea they entered to avoid the death penalty. Both maintained their innocence afterward and the commission would later find that DNA evidence from the scene did, in fact, exclude both men from being the killer.
The commission passed along its findings to a three-judge panel that freed the men. “We investigated a case form beginning to end, and in that process, turned up some information that we were able to pass along to our commission that shed like on the innocence of these individuals,” Smith said on the program.
The commission, a neutral state agency, is charged with investigating claims of innocence. It is the first of its kind in the United States.
Smith was a political science major at Elon and graduated summa cum laude. She earned her law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008 and later joined the newly established commission.