ADA — A prosecutor is asking for a new trial date for Karl Allen Fontenot, more than three years after a judge threw out his murder conviction “based on the numerous constitutional violations that occurred in this case.”
Comanche County District Attorney Kyle Cabelka said he made his decision after talking with the family of the victim in the infamous 1984 case.
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“We’re going to prepare for a trial,” he said Sunday. “They’re still interested in us pursuing this.”
A federal judge in Muskogee vacated the murder conviction months after the Netflix series, “The Innocent Man,” renewed national attention on the case.
U.S. District Judge James H. Payne had given prosecutors 120 days to seek a new trial or permanently release Fontenot from custody. That deadline was pushed back by an appeal that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The new deadline was Tuesday. Cabelka, who took over the case from Pontotoc County prosecutors, filed his request for a trial date on Friday.
The victim, Donna Denice Haraway, disappeared from the McAnally’s convenience store in Ada on April 28, 1984. The newlywed college student worked as a clerk there at night. She was 24.
Two Ada men, Fontenot and Tommy Ward, were sentenced to death at a 1985 murder trial even though the body of the victim had not yet been found.
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Both confessed involvement, saying the clerk was kidnapped and fatally stabbed after the store was robbed of $150. Fontenot told police the body had been burned and buried near the Ada power plant.
Ward later claimed he only had been recounting a dream to police. Fontenot claimed police coerced a confession from him after telling him what Ward said.
Their confessions turned out to be wrong in key details.
Most significantly, the victim’s skull and other remains were found more than a year after her disappearance. She had been shot in the head and dumped in a field near Gerty, about 30 miles away.
In 1987, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ordered separate new trials after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled defendants with interlocking confessions could not be tried together.
Fontenot was retried in 1988 and again sentenced to death despite the inconsistencies in his police statement. Because of a retrial error, he later was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Ward was retried in 1989 and sentenced to life in prison. A state judge in 2020 vacated Ward’s conviction but the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals reinstated it in August.
In overturning Fontenot’s conviction, the federal judge called newly discovered evidence about his alibi and other suspects “solid proof” of his “probable innocence.”
“The inept handling of reports, evidence, and all other vital documentation from this case clearly falls within a known pattern of police misconduct that the lead detectives and agents working on this case were known to commit,” Payne wrote.
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The judge agreed police had coerced a false confession from Fontenot who was particularly susceptible to suggestion because of his abnormally low intelligence.
A federal appeals court upheld the judge’s decision in 2021.
“Almost no evidence connected him to the crime other than his own videotaped confession, a confession thatrang false in almost every particular,” the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote. “Mr. Fontenot fully recanted just two days later, accusing the police of feeding him a false narrative of his own involvement.”
The U.S. Supreme Court refused in June to get involved.
The Netflix series is based on novelist John Grisham’s only non-fiction book. The victim’s family has complained both the book and series are one-sided.
“Both are commercial enterprises designed to feed off of people’s desire to see and read about conspiracies,” the family said. “We could write an entire book refuting the falsehoods and distortions contained in the book, series and briefs filed by the attorneys.”
Fontenot, now 58, was freed from prison late in 2019 after the judge ruled in his favor. Ward, 62, has remained locked up.
Recommending Fontenot be tried again was Sandra Elliott, who prosecuted Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols at his state trial in 2004. The Oklahoma District Attorneys Council hired her to review boxes and boxes of evidence in the case and make a recommendation.
Fontenot sued the state last year in federal court for compensatory and punitive damages. “Mr. Fontenot now seeks justice and accountability for his 35 years of wrongful incarceration,” his attorneys wrote in the civil complaint.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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