Salt Lake City – The UTAH Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that “numerous constitutional violations” during the trial and sentence of a man who spent decades in the death corridor deserves a new trial.
The judges affirmed the ruling of a judge of the lower court who had ordered a new trial for Douglas Stewart Carter After finding problems with how the police and prosecutors handled their case. Carter, 69, was sentenced to death in 1985 after a jury found him guilty of killing Eva Olesen, the aunt of a former leader of police officer who was found stabbed a dozen times and shot in the head.
While no physical evidence linked him to the crime scene, prosecutors condemned Carter, a black man, based on a written confession and two witnesses who said he had boasted to kill Olesen, a white woman. Carter has argued that his confession was coerced.
In 2019, the Utah Supreme Court sent the case of Carter back to a lower court for review after witnesses, two immigrants without legal status, said the police and prosecutors offered to pay their rent, trained them to lie in court and threatened to deport them or their son if they did not involve Carter.
Judge Derek Pullan ordered a new trial in 2022, saying that witness testimonies and police misconduct harmed the original trial. The Utah Attorney General’s office appealed, which led to the decision of the Superior Court on Thursday.
“There is no doubt that these numerous constitutional violations (suppression of evidence, perjury and nocturnal suborption knowingly correcting the false testimony, harmed to Carter both in their judgment and in sentence,” Judge Paige Petersen wrote in the opinion of the Superior Court.
It is rare, he added, to see a case that involves “multiple instances of intentional misconduct” by two police officers, including the principal investigator and a prosecutor. Provo police lieutenant George Pierpont had obtained Carter’s confession, and officer Richard Mack gathered witness statements. The Post -Conviction Court also found that prosecutor Wayne Watson was present when the police addressed a witness that would lie, and did not correct the false testimony during the trial.
Carter remains in prison while waiting for a new trial, said his lawyer, Eric Zuckerman.
“Mr. Carter has spent more than forty years after bars due to an unconstitutional conviction entrenched in the police and fiscal misconduct, including the suborption of perjury before a jury of his companions,” Zuckerman said in a statement. “We are satisfied that both the Court of First Instance and the Supreme Court of UTAH have validated the claims of Mr. Carter. But no ruling can restore the four decades of freedom that the state of Utah unjustly removed it.”
Carter is among several inmates involved in a separate demand that defies the methods and protocols for the execution of UTAH.
Olesen’s family has repeatedly expressed the frustration that the case of murder of decades is ongoing.
“We extend our hearts and sympathies to Eva Olesen’s family, which has sought justice for murder in the last 40 years,” said Madison McMicken, spokesman for the Utah attorney general, Derek Brown. “We are disappointed that the Olesen family does not yet have a resolution in this case.”
