Man acquitted in murder-for-hire trial

MARION —“Mr. Parms, you are free to go.”

With those words from 12th Circuit Judge Michael Nettles, the weeklong murder trial of 20-year-old Terrance Jamal Parms of High Point, N.C., came to an end late Friday afternoon at the Marion County Courthouse.

A jury deliberated less than an hour before finding Parms not guilty of murder in the April 28, 2008, slaying of Kanisha McLaughlin.

McLaughlin, a confidential informant for the Marion County Combined Drug Unit, was shot to death in Room 110 at the Imperial Motel in Mullins.

Parms showed little emotion when the verdict was read but hugged his mother tightly as soon as court adjourned.

Parms’ attorney, Scott Joye of Murrells Inlet, said he thinks justice was served.

“It’s been a long, hard week. The jurors paid attention, and at the end of the day, I think they got it right,” Joye said.

The state alleged Parms was contracted by Dewayne Terry of Fair Bluff, N.C., and Devares Brantley of Mullins to kill McLaughlin before she could testify in a pending drug case.

Parms admits he came to Mullins to sell drugs and was with McLaughlin in the motel room that night. But he contends he was in the room next door when Terry shot McLaughlin and maintains he had no idea Terry planned to kill her.

“You’ve heard about the ‘hand of one is the hand of all,’” Joye told jurors during his closing argument. “But it’s not only the hand of one is the hand of all. Everyone has to know what the other hand’s doing. If one hand doesn’t know, it’s game over.”

Joye called Parms “the perfect patsy” in his closing argument and said Terry and Brantley set him up to take the fall by leaving him in the motel room with McLaughlin. Despite the fact that Parms was in the motel room, Joye said, there was no physical evidence to link him to the fatal shooting.

“The plan was to get Terrance Parms, bring him down here and leave all of this evidence in that motel room,” Joye said. “And then sooner or later, DNA and fingerprints would match up and sooner or later point to Terrance Parms.”

Joye used the rest of his closing argument to chip away at the credibility of the state’s witnesses.

“This case is built on the foundation of people you wouldn’t trust to walk across the room with your wallet, wouldn’t trust with your car keys and certainly wouldn’t trust with your spouse or children,” he said.

A key witness, Willie Mae “Sista” Reaves, who was in the room next door at the Imperial Motel the night the shooting happened, admitted on the witness stand she smoked crack cocaine just before coming to court to testify.

Phillip Williams, a federal inmate who was housed at the Florence County Detention Center in Effingham while Parms was being held there, testified Parms told him Terry’s girlfriend, Karen Worley of Fair Bluff, helped police recover the gun used in the shooting from a pond. He then changed his story when Joye pointed out a discrepancy in his timeline.

“He said Mr. Parms told him the defendant’s girlfriend had taken ‘them’ to the gun,” Joye said to the judge on “But that was six months before the gun was recovered from the pond.”

Williams recanted his statement and said he must have heard the gun story from somebody else.

Twelfth Circuit Solicitor Ed Clements III said he was shocked when Williams lied about the gun story but believes the other witnesses were truthful.

“We did the best we could with what we had,” Clements said.

“The law enforcement officers worked long and hard on this, and we put up every bit of evidence we could get in,” Clements said. “I hate it for Kanisha’s family, and I hate it for law enforcement. But the jury has spoken, and I believe in our judicial system. If they have reasonable doubt, they’re supposed to turn him loose. And in this case, that’s what they did.”

Brantley and Terry are charged with murder in connection with McLaughlin’s death. Brantley also is charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Worley, who testified in the Parms trial, is charged with accessory to murder before and after the fact.