SARASOTA COUNTY – — Two weeks after a man was gunned down on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way in June, a woman came to Sarasota police and identified two men she saw pointing guns at the victim just before the shots rang out.
In one of those identifications, however, she was wrong.
In a case that highlights the fallibility of eyewitness testimony, prosecutors dropped a murder charge against Timothy Jenkins Jr., 20, this month.
But his exoneration came only after he turned himself in and spent 39 days in jail, too stressed to sleep, filling his 23-hours-a-day stint in solitary confinement by doing push-ups and reading the Bible.
“My client kept telling me, ‘I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there,'” said defense attorney Liane McCurry, who worked with private investigator Carol Springer to find proof that Jenkins was innocent.
Springer went to Newtown and found witnesses and reconstructed the events of the shooting that backed up Jenkins’ alibi. “We got everything to show he absolutely wasn’t there,” McCurry said.
Sarasota police detectives had made the arrest based mainly on the word of the woman, an eyewitness who said she was directly across the street from the spot where Willie Hadley, 21, was fatally shot during a confrontation at about 2 a.m. on June 13.
The woman said she saw Jenkins and Marcus Moody, known to be childhood friends, point guns at Hadley in the 1900 block of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way. She told police she turned away to avoid danger, heard the gunshots, and saw Hadley lying in the street. She pointed out Jenkins and Moody in a photo lineup.
http://liarcatchers.com/fraud_investigation.html
