La. Inmate on Death Row to Get New Trial

A year after DNA tests indicated that Louisiana prosecutors had convicted the wrong man of a 1997 murder, officials agreed Wednesday to grant the man a new trial after five years on death row.

The DNA tests on evidence central to the murder case had shown no links to Ryan Matthews, 24, who has steadfastly maintained his innocence since he was arrested for the murder of Tommy Vanhoose, a grocer.

Instead, the tests on a ski mask worn by Vanhoose’s assailant pointed to a different man, Rondell Love. He was already in prison, serving a 20-year sentence for killing a woman in the same area where Vanhoose died, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, eight months after the grocer was killed.

In addition to the DNA evidence implicating Love, three prisoners filed declarations in court last year saying that Love had bragged to them that he had murdered Vanhoose.

Until Wednesday, however, Jefferson Parish Dist. Atty. Paul D. Connick Jr. and his prosecutors had resisted granting a new trial for Matthews. Last month, Assistant Dist. Atty. David Wolfe said there were “absolutely no merits” to the defense contentions that the DNA showed Matthews was not the killer.

Connick reversed field on the eve of hearings called for today and Friday by District Judge Henry Sullivan to review the ethics of how Jefferson Parish prosecutors had handled Matthews’ trial in 1999.

Among the issues to be considered were allegations that prosecutors had suppressed important information about one of their key witnesses during the trial.

The case has attracted attention because of the unusual situation of prosecutors refusing to follow the lead of a DNA test. Such tests are often the strongest evidence prosecutors use to obtain guilty verdicts, but they also have been used in a growing number of cases to free people who were wrongly convicted.

In a formal statement issued by his office Wednesday, Connick said he was acting “in the interest of justice” because the DNA test results on the ski mask “confirmed the presence of DNA of someone other” than Matthews. Connick’s statement did not mention Love.

Billy Sothern of the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, one of Matthews’ appellate lawyers, said Connick had “clearly made the right decision.”

“We are very glad that Ryan is off death row, and we expect that he will be freed to come home very soon,” he added.

Sothern and his co-counsel, Clive Stafford Smith, said that given the current state of the evidence, Matthews should be freed without a retrial. They said they would continue to push for Matthews’ release.

“Hopefully they will come to the recognition that there is no case against Ryan. This is a classic case of a wrongful conviction,” Smith said.

No physical evidence has been found to link Matthews, who had just turned 17 when he was arrested, to the Vanhoose murder. Vanhoose, the well-liked owner of Comeaux’s Grocery, near the Avondale Shipyard on the west bank of the Mississippi River, was shot four times with a .38-caliber revolver during a bungled robbery attempt and bled to death.

Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project at New York’s Cardozo Law School, who is working with Matthews’ defense team, said the DNA tests made it clear that Matthews did not murder Vanhoose and strongly indicated that Love did. Love’s DNA was found on the mouth area of the ski mask that the killer wore, according to tests performed by Bode Laboratories of Virginia.

“It’s clear to me that the district attorney’s office is coming to grips with the significance and implications of the DNA evidence, and they are bound to follow the leads,” Scheck said.

Scheck and other lawyers working on Matthews’ behalf say they believe the prosecutors have been reluctant to drop the case against Matthews, despite the DNA evidence, because of a confession they got from Matthews’ friend Travis Hayes.

After six hours of interrogation by police, Hayes told investigators that he had driven with Matthews to Vanhoose’s store, had watched his friend go in and, about 15 minutes later, heard shots and saw Matthews run out.

The two then drove away, and he never asked Matthews what had happened, Hayes said.

Hayes was convicted of second-degree murder for his involvement in the killing. His statement conflicted in several ways with other witness testimony and was never used at Matthews’ trial.

But for the prosecutors, “the confession is troubling,” Scheck said.

Richard Ofshe, a UC Berkeley sociologist who is considered one of the country’s leading experts on false confessions, reviewed Hayes’ statements and other evidence for Hayes’ appeal and filed a declaration saying there was “cause for serious doubt about the reliability of the confession.”

In 23 of the 143 cases where DNA evidence has led to a post-conviction exoneration over the last 15 years, there was a false confession, according to the Innocence Project. Despite growing evidence that people really do confess falsely, Scheck said, it “is always harder for prosecutors to accept.”

Prosecutors declined to comment.

Connick’s decision to give Matthews a new trial came 11 months after the Louisiana Supreme Court responded to the DNA test results and other material presented by Matthews’ appellate lawyers and ordered a special hearing.

In addition to the DNA evidence, the court also considered arguments about the two main witnesses against Matthews, a man and a woman who each claimed to have seen Vanhoose’s killer.

The way authorities handled one of the witnesses raised questions about whether Matthews got a fair trial, the state Supreme Court said.

Matthews’ mother, Pauline, and his sister Monique, who visit him frequently in prison, said they were disturbed that he had not been released, particularly because he periodically had seizures and did not always get the medicine he needed in prison.

“I can’t believe it,” Pauline said. “If DNA proves guilt, why can’t it prove innocence. Is it so hard [for the prosecutors] to say, ‘I made a mistake?’ I wonder how they would feel if it was one of their children.”