“The worst thing that can happen in a case like this is that you are assigned a bad lawyer, and that is what happened to Paul. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong,” explained the senator Spanish Rosa Vindel, of the PP, the output of the trial, which continues to these days in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, against the Spanish Pablo Ibar. In the year 2000, Ibar was sentenced to death for a triple murder which has always been declared innocent. His lawyer entered a spiral of self-destruction that left him in helplessness. This was acknowledged by the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered the retrial because he had a defense-deficient, and because the tests were “slim” and “flimsy”. Last week began the new trial that will end with the return of Ibar to death row or with their freedom, after half a lifetime in prison. Now, match all, Pablo Ibar itself boasts a good defense. And their strategy is clear. Is limited to remove the flimsy evidence of the prosecution: the three threads of which hangs the life of Pablo Ibar.
1. The star witness
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The moment of truth for Pablo Ibar The last word to Paul Ibar
The June 26, 1994, the two killers fled the scene of the crime in the car of the businessman of the night, Casimir Sucharski, to which they had just killed alongside two dancers Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers. On the 14th of July, a week after that they stopped to Ibar because a police officer felt that it looked like an image captured by a surveillance camera, the detectives in charge of the case received in the police station to Gary Foy, a neighbor of Sucharski who said that the black Mercedes of the entrepreneur stopped behind his car at a traffic light. Foy saw that it was not Sucharski, who was traveling in his home, but two young people that you thought were latino. Just saw it, warned Foy, in the rearview mirror, during the few seconds that it remained in the red traffic light. The detectives showed Foy six photographs, one of which was that of Ibar, and asked if I recognized any of the occupants of the vehicle. Foy first said no. The officers told her that I had to point to one and the witness pointed to a photo that was not the Ibar. They asked him to try again and then it pointed out to Ibar. But he warned that it was not safe. Only the fact that the agents who showed the photographs to know who was the suspect an irregularity, as will an expert, since they may influence, even unintentionally, to the witness. The next day he organised to Foy a wheel of recognition in vivo. There were six young people, only one of which coincided with one of Romabet the photographs: Pablo Ibar. Foy was pointed out to him. In the new trial, the defense intended to put in evidence the irregularities in the identification. “Drove to Foy in a totally illegal manner, manipulated deliberately, had no case and had to fabricate one,” said the lawyer.
2. Tape video
When you enter the house of Sucharski in Miramar, city of Broward county (Florida), where they lay three dead bodies, the detectives found a surveillance camera that had been recorded with poor quality, how two individuals, one with a cap and the other covered with a t-shirt, entering in the house and killed the victims with gunshots at close range. The prosecution argues that Ibar is the individual who takes the face covered by a t-shirt and, in the end, removed the garment to dry the sweat, discovered briefly before the camera, and the leaves lying on the ground. He was also sentenced to death for the crime Seth Penalver, who detectives identified as the other assailant. But the Florida Supreme detected irregularities in the trial and also ordered its repetition, after that Penalver was released. “An essential part of his defence was the claim that was not the subject of the video tape and to support it used an expert in forensic anthropology. In the judgment of the Ibar, his lawyer did not present an expert on facial recognition despite the fact that Ibar requested,” explained the high court. This time, the defense does have an expert. An eminence in the world matters, which bring from the Uk, a country where the presence of video cameras in the streets very frequently the work of identification. “The expert concludes that Ibar is not the individual you see in the video,” explains the defense.
3. The t-shirt
they found more than a hundred footprints in the scene of the crime, one of them even with blood. No points to Ibar. The lack of physical evidence is one of the great failings of the prosecution. Until now. The t-shirt that covered the face of one of the murderers has been analyzed on five occasions. Never threw a match on the DNA of Ibar. But now, after a new analysis carried out in 2016, there is a match on a surface of a lower case letter. The prosecutor’s office attributed the new finding to the improvement of the techniques of analysis. The defense holds, directly, that the test has been manipulated. “He was wearing the t-shirt in the face, spoke volumes. Saliva, sweat… the DNA should be for the whole t-shirt. And so it is. But it is not the Ibar. It has been analyzed five times and the DNA remains of an unknown number 1. Now it seems that there is a coincidence in a small space. In 16 years it has changed the technique, yes. Especially to put a speck of DNA from someone,” said the lawyer to the jury.
The defense will explain that the t-shirt came to the laboratory in a paper envelope, inside a box, which was open, and inside which there were more objects. In the early days of the view were successfully completed an old trick: they invited one of the experts of the office to catch with their fingers in a bullet casing that constitutes a proof, and this is what he did. If an expert has contaminated a trial before the judge, what may not have happened in 24 years?