{"id":29192,"date":"2022-02-27T09:31:38","date_gmt":"2022-02-27T09:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/?p=29192"},"modified":"2022-02-27T09:31:38","modified_gmt":"2022-02-27T09:31:38","slug":"man-says-hes-innocent-of-murder-should-prosecutors-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/02\/27\/man-says-hes-innocent-of-murder-should-prosecutors-help\/","title":{"rendered":"Man says he\u2019s innocent of murder. Should prosecutors help?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. (AP) \u2014 Gary Cannon held back tears when a Pinellas-Pasco judge sentenced him to life in prison in 2005.<\/p>\n

\u201cAin\u2019t nothing been done right,\u201d he said. \u201cYou got people lying left and right.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Cannon has maintained his innocence in the rape and murder of 9-year-old Sharra Ferger, a girl he had babysat.<\/p>\n

When a Supreme Court ruling 10 years ago opened thousands of convictions for review, defense lawyers renewed their efforts to exonerate Cannon.<\/p>\n

Cannon\u2019s attorneys say the case against him was based on flawed evidence and that the results of new DNA testing suggest someone else may have been responsible.<\/p>\n


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\u201cHis case contains nearly all the factors contributing to wrongful convictions,\u201d they wrote in a motion.<\/p>\n

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But prosecutors have long maintained that Cannon was guilty. More recently, they have fought against DNA testing and balked at requests for a new trial, records show.<\/p>\n

In June, a judge will decide whether Cannon should get another shot or if prosecutors got it right in 2005.<\/p>\n

His potential freedom is far from the only thing at stake.<\/p>\n

The ruling could become a key issue in this November\u2019s Pinellas-Pasco state attorney election, the first contested race for the office in three decades.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s deeply personal for both candidates.<\/p>\n

The incumbent, Bruce Bartlett, was one of the prosecutors who tried the case in 2005. His opponent, former public defender Allison Miller, served on Cannon\u2019s defense team.<\/p>\n

\u2018Every bit of what he deserved\u2019<\/p>\n

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Sharra Ferger\u2019s body was found in a field north of Dade City on Oct. 3, 1997.<\/p>\n

She had been raped and stabbed 46 times.<\/p>\n

Within two weeks, police had zeroed in on a suspect: a neighbor of Sharra\u2019s named Dale Morris, whose teeth, authorities said at the time, matched a bite mark on the girl\u2019s shoulder.<\/p>\n

The Public Defender\u2019s Office, convinced of Morris\u2019 innocence, found experts who refuted the theory. Later, more physical evidence ruled out Morris. Prosecutors dropped the charges a few weeks before Morris\u2019 trial was set to start.<\/p>\n

Years later, in 2001, a grand jury indicted two other men: Cannon and Sharra\u2019s uncle, Gary Elishi Cochran.<\/p>\n

The case against them relied heavily on testimony from a jailhouse informant. Randy Kernan told authorities that Cannon described in detail how he and Cochran lured Sharra into a field, then raped and killed her.<\/p>\n

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The alleged confession happened while Cannon was in jail for an unrelated strong-arm robbery of a 70-year-old man that occurred a few weeks after Sharra\u2019s death. Kernan testified against Cannon in that case, too, which had no physical evidence linking him to the crime. Cannon\u2019s current attorneys plan to challenge that conviction.<\/p>\n

There were no witnesses to Sharra\u2019s murder, but hairs found on her body matched Cannon\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Defense attorneys said the hair could have come from a couch at Sharra\u2019s home, where Cannon had slept a few weeks before she was killed.<\/p>\n

The physical evidence against Cochran was the bite mark \u2014 the same one that erroneously implicated Morris.<\/p>\n

Cannon went to trial in 2005. Cochran pleaded guilty the next year to avoid the death penalty.<\/p>\n

Both men are serving life sentences.<\/p>\n

Speaking to the Tampa Bay Times after Cannon\u2019s 2005 trial, Bartlett said he would have sought death for Cannon, too, if he wasn\u2019t barred by his age. Cannon was 17 at the time of the murder, and a Supreme Court decision banned juveniles from receiving the harshest punishment.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe got every bit of what he deserved,\u201d Bartlett said then.<\/p>\n

Cannon tried to appeal his conviction to no avail. Then, in 2012, the Supreme Court made thousands of cases eligible for resentencing \u2014 including his own.<\/p>\n

Cannon\u2019s new lawyers, a group of public defenders, pored over old evidence, depositions and trial transcripts, preparing for an eventual resentencing hearing. And they asked a judge to release old DNA evidence in the case for testing, arguing that part of the process involved assessing the defendant\u2019s culpability.<\/p>\n

The results, they said, cast doubt on Cannon\u2019s conviction.<\/p>\n

The testing showed there was DNA inside of Sharra that didn\u2019t belong to her. But it came from an unknown party, the attorneys said. It didn\u2019t match Cannon or Cochran.<\/p>\n

\u2018People are inherently fallible\u2019<\/p>\n

Cannon\u2019s case comes at a new era for post-conviction innocence claims \u2014 and highlights an important difference between the two candidates for state attorney.<\/p>\n

For years, defense attorneys and criminal justice reform groups such as the Innocence Project have poked holes in old convictions, ushering in a wave of exonerations through the 1990s and early 2000s.<\/p>\n

More recently, prosecutors\u2019 offices across the country \u2014 including a handful in Florida \u2014 have joined the effort to root out wrongful convictions.<\/p>\n

These newly formed conviction review units often work in tandem with defense attorneys, an unusual show of cooperation that reexamines evidence, removes procedural barriers, and speeds up the process.<\/p>\n

Unit directors look for information the jury didn\u2019t hear at trial, or for possible pitfalls in the investigation. That could be DNA evidence that wasn\u2019t tested, an alibi that wasn\u2019t fully explored or uncorroborated witness testimony. They have access to prosecutor files and attorney notes that are often hard to get.<\/p>\n

Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren, who ran a reform campaign and unseated a longtime incumbent, started such a unit in 2018.<\/p>\n

Within two years, it had exonerated a man who had been sentenced to death in the 1983 rape and murder of a woman in Tampa.<\/p>\n

Robert Duboise\u2019 conviction hinged on bite mark evidence, which has since been discredited by scientists as unreliable. Teeth impressions aren\u2019t necessarily unique, according to the Innocence Project, and human skin is a bad medium to capture an accurate bite mark.<\/p>\n

The conviction also relied on testimony from a jailhouse informant. That kind of testimony has come under intense scrutiny in recent years for its frequent involvement in convictions later disproven by modern DNA testing. The Innocence Project put the count at one in five.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, in 2020, Warren announced that DNA evidence located by his conviction review unit cleared Duboise of the crimes. After 37 years, he walked out of prison.<\/p>\n

The Pinellas-Pasco prosecutor\u2019s office, however, doesn\u2019t have such a unit.<\/p>\n