Pablo Ibar will ask this Tuesday that his life sentence be revoked and a new trial be held.
Pablo Ibar, nephew of the legendary Basque boxer José Manuel Ibar ‘Urtain’, hopes to achieve, at a hearing to be held this Tuesday in the Florida Court of Appealsto have his 2019 life sentence overturned. and that the trial be repeated in order to prove his “innocence” in the triple crime of June 1994.
His lawyer, Joe Nascimento, will allege “contamination” in the custody of the main evidence in the case, the T-shirt with which one of the perpetrators covered his face, and on which genetic traces of the accused appeared. in very small amounts. In the previous trial, an analyst claimed that the T-shirt with Ibar’s DNA came in a bag with the seal open.
The Pablo Ibar-Fair Trial Association has pointed out, in a statement, that Pablo Ibar faces “a crucial phase in the fight he maintains to prove his innocence.” This Tuesday, the Court of Appeals, based in West Palm Beach (Florida), will be the scene of the appeal hearing in which the prisoner of Spanish origin, who spent nearly 20 years on death rowwill request the revocation of the life sentence he is currently serving and the holding of a new trial “with all the guarantees”.
Ibar is currently sentenced to be confined for life, after the 2019 was convicted of a triple murderwhose authorship he has always denied. “I am confident that, after reviewing the evidence, as well as the issues and decisions of the court that tried him between 2018 and 2019, the judges will agree that Pablo did not receive a fair trial,” says the inmate’s lawyer, Joe Nascimento.
The appeal will begin at 2 p.m. local time in Florida (8 p.m. in Spain), and. will be conducted by videoconferencea practice increasingly widespread in North America due to the pandemic, so neither Ibar’s lawyer nor the representative of the Prosecutor’s Office will be present at the courthouse.
Ten minutes to state his reasons
The procedural act, however, will be retransmitted through the official website of the Court of Appeals itself. Nascimento will have only 10 minutes to present his reasons for requesting that his defendant be retried. The session is expected to to begin with the initial presentation by counsel. Subsequently, the assigned prosecutor will intervene, and will conclude with a last intervention reserved for the defense.
Joe Nascimento plans to present twelve motifs why he believes the Pablo Ibar trial held between 2018 and 2019 was “unfair.” The attorney’s brief alone has more than one hundred pages.
The existence of a “minuscule” sample of DNA belonging to Pablo Ibar on a T-shirt that was found at the scene of the events and which was worn by one of the perpetrators of the crimewill be the main focus of the lawyer’s speech. The assessment of this evidence is precisely one of the key reasons that he wields in his appeal text, the Pablo Ibar-Fair Trial Association has assured.
This biological sample was incorporated into the case in a surprise manner. only a few months before the start of the last trial. Up to that moment, all the analyses carried out had been negative with respect to remains linked to Ibar. The genetic traces of the accused found were, moreover, of small values that, according to the defense and experts, could only be the result of accidental contamination during the storage of evidence.
Joe Nascimento expects that in the hearing they will ask about the DNA, because he will be “prepared to show them how in six different areas of the shirt the DNA of a man appears, and that man is not Pablo Ibar”. Likewise, the defense wants to demonstrate to the judges that the man who appears in the video that recorded the crime “and rubbed the shirt over his face several times, touched it repeatedly, wiped his mouth and talked inside the shirt for several minutes,” so there was saliva on the garment that did not correspond to that of his client.
Ibar was recently transferred from the Okeechobee (Florida) Correctional Center, where he had been held since his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.He was sent to another private facility, where he carried out various activities and began a welding course.
The ruling could take months to be known
This phase can take several months or even longer. it is not excluded that the ruling may take a year to be known.. In the event that the appeal is unsuccessful in this instance, the defense will go to the Florida Supreme Court.
Pablo Ibar was declared guilty of the triple crime that in June 1994 ended the lives of Casimir Sucharski, owner of a nightclub and owner of the villa where the crimes were committed, and of young Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers.
The three were killed by two individuals who broke into the house. The sequence of events was recorded by a video camera located in the living room of the house, which, at a certain point, captures the face of a young man with Latin features whom the police identified as Pablo Ibar.
However, in the last trial held in 2018-2019 it was accredited, even by prosecution expert witnesses, that this video was not of sufficient image quality to make any identification.
