A Michigan judge has decided not to rehear a convicted man’s appeal for a new trial after University of Wisconsin Law School students uncovered new evidence in his case.
Maurice Carter, age 60, has been imprisoned for the past 27 years after he was convicted of shooting and wounding a Michigan police officer. According to the UW Innocence Project co-director Keith Findley, Carter has a life-threatening liver disease requiring a transplant, but he cannot receive such medical attention through the prison system.
“Many states would allow him to receive a transplant, but the HMO … is a notoriously difficult organization to work with,” Findley said.
He said two hospitals that could perform the evaluation and operation have refused to service Carter from prison due to the difficulty of treating him through the Department of Corrections. Doctors have told Carter he has a 50 to 80 percent chance of living through the next year, Findley said.
A Michigan judge said he decided not to hear Carter’s case because the new information found by the Innocence Project would not have affected the jury’s 1976 decision.
Findley said he took up Carter’s case at the request of a Cardoza Law School that does similar investigative work. Carter originally wrote to the Cardoza Law School for help.
“They only work with DNA evidence, but they were so troubled they sent the case to us,” Findley said.
Carter was charged in the apparently unprovoked shooting after two years of investigation. A man suspected in another crime agreed to identify the shooter in exchange for dropped charges. Findley said the man later recanted when Carter’s picture was flashed on the front page of a newspaper and eyewitnesses suddenly decided Carter was in fact the shooter they had seen.
“[The witnesses originally] excluded him and made statements that they couldn’t identify him,” Findley said. “From day one the store clerk insisted it wasn’t him.”
Findley said he and the law school students gathered such testimony and produced new eyewitnesses who claimed Carter was the wrong man.
“It turns out he had no motive, no confession, no reason and all they had were a few eyewitnesses,” Findley said.
Innocence Project lawyers requested Carter’s appeal one year ago after investigating the case for four years. After the judge’s refusal to hear the case, Carter asked Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm for clemency to commute his sentence. However, the state Parole Board will review Carter’s case before it is turned over to Granholm, according to the Associated Press, and Carter’s attorney will appeal the case through the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Last September, the Innocence Project helped release Steven Avery, a man accused of battery in 1985, who had served 18 years of a 32-year sentence. When the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory tested hairs gathered from the crime scene, they found that the DNA did not match Avery’s and matched another man currently serving jail time for a similar crime committed in 1985.
