On April 29, 2008, Kalvin Michael Smith filed his second Motion for Appropriate Relief (M.A.R.) with the help of a local attorney working pro bono and the Duke University Law School Innocence Project. Because it contained allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the Forsyth County District Attorney’s office, the response to the M.A.R was referred to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper. Mr. Cooper then had a decision to make. Do I do the right thing, look at the facts of the case objectively, and do not contest the M.A.R, which would allow Michael a new trial? Or do I fight the M.A.R., which would have the effect of preserving the injustice? Cooper was up for re-election in November. He decided to fight to preserve the injustice. And fight he did!

To make matters worse, his office did not actually take the case from the local district attorney; they teamed up and worked together. Rather than relieve the local district attorney’s office of any involvement in the case and act independently, Cooper had his office collaborate with and defend the very people who (according to the evidence and recanting witnesses presented in the M.A.R) may have allowed for the injustice or perpetrated it. Cooper’s office also worked with the detectives named in the M.A.R., effectively defending them as well.

In September, 2008, Roy Cooper's office added to a brief they had filed in which they again asserted that all 11 claims of Michael’s M.A.R. should be dismissed. They argued the same vigorously in a September 29, 2008 hearing in Superior Court and actually succeeded in getting the judge to dismiss 6 of the 11 claims.

In that very same month (September, 2008,) in a move of stunning hypocrisy and cynicism, Cooper released this TV ad, which he continued to run statewide through the November 4, 2008 election. While watching this ad, keep in mind that Cooper did not become involved in the case of the three wrongly accused Duke Lacrosse players until after the national media became fixated on it. The three wrongly accused Duke Lacrosse players were white and came from privileged families. They never were convicted and spent only a very short time in custody. Michael is a poor African American. He has been in custody continuously since January 24, 1997. Until recently, Michael's case was not well known outside of Winston-Salem. It's also interesting to note that Professor James Coleman of the Duke University Law School Innocence Project was (in the days immediately following the falsely alleged non-events of which the Duke Lacrosse Players were accused in March, 2006) the first prominent voice to condemn the "rush to judgment," the same "rush to judgment" that Cooper decries in this advertisement. Sadly, when in 2008, Professor Coleman appealed to Attorney General Cooper to conduct a fair and impartial review of the facts of the Silk Plant Forest case, Cooper met Coleman with a deaf ear.