"Va. won't appeal decision vacating death sentence," is Larry O'Dell's AP breaking news report, via the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The Virginia attorney general's office said today it will not appeal a court's ruling exonerating a death row inmate convicted of hiring another man to kill his marijuana supplier.
Justin Michael Wolfe was sentenced to death for the 2001 slaying of Daniel Petrole Jr. in a case that exposed a multimillion-dollar drug ring run by young people barely out of high school in the affluent northern Virginia suburbs. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month upheld a judge's decision vacating the 31-year-old's conviction and sentence because prosecutors withheld evidence that would have discredited their star witness -- the triggerman, who later recanted his testimony.
Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli's office did not oppose a ruling today finalizing the appellate court's decision.
"In our opinion, further litigation would not change the result," Cuccinelli spokeswoman Caroline Gibson wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
She referred further questions to the Prince William County prosecutor's office, which will determine whether to retry Wolfe. Commonwealth's Attorney Paul Ebert did not immediately respond to a voice mail message.
Technically, the attorney general's office still has until mid-November to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Wolfe's attorney was encouraged by the developments.
"We are optimistic this means the attorney general's office is not going to pursue further appeals, and the only question is whether the commonwealth's attorney is going to allow Justin to return home or retry him," attorney Ashley Parrish said.
He added that he will ask for Wolfe's release from prison "at the appropriate time."
And:
Wolfe would become the first wrongfully convicted inmate freed from Virginia's death row since DNA evidence cleared Earl Washington in 2000.
Wolfe was convicted largely based on the testimony of Owen Barber IV, who in 2005 recanted his story that Wolfe hired him to kill Petrole. After a four-day evidentiary hearing last year, U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson found Barber's recantation credible and ruled that prosecutors improperly suppressed several pieces of evidence.
The appeals court zeroed in on one piece of withheld evidence: a report by a detective who flew to California to bring Barber back to Virginia. The report said the officer told Barber he might avoid the death penalty if he implicated Wolfe in the slaying. Barber later agreed to plead guilty to first-degree murder and testify against Wolfe in exchange for a life sentence.
Appeals Court Judge Robert King wrote that the report "is indubitably impeaching, in that it establishes a motive not only for Barber to implicate someone else, but to point the finger specifically at Wolfe."
Earlier coverage of Justin Wolfe's case begins at the link.
Related posts are in the prosecutorial misconduct category index. The responsibility of the state to provide exculpatory evidence to the defense was articulated in the 1963 Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland; more via Oyez.
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