Pablo Ibar requests the annulment of his life sentence in an appeal in Florida

twelve reasons. From some DNA samples on a T-shirt that do not match those of the suspect to a jury that regrets the verdict of that time and alleges that they have received “pressure.” In a hearing before the Court of Appeals for the Fourth District of Florida (USA), the lawyer for Spanish-American Pablo Ibar, Joe Nascimento, has invoked this series of conclusions to demand that the trial that sentenced his client to be declared null and void. life sentence in 2019 and a new one to be held. The three-magistrate court, chaired by Judge Melanie May, will now deliberate on the arguments of the lawyer and the Prosecutor’s Office. His decision may take months to come.

Ibar, nephew of the Basque boxer José Manuel Ibar urtain, has spent nearly thirty years in prison in Florida, accused of the triple murder of Casimir Sucharsky, a nightclub owner, and models Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers on June 26, 1994. The suspect has always denied his involvement in the case , of which he was found guilty in 2000 and sentenced to death. After 16 years in the death row, in 2016 an appeals court annulled that sentence considering the evidence “too flimsy” and ordered a new trial. In 2019, this new process sentenced the Hispanic-American of Basque origin to life imprisonment.

But the defense alleges that in 2019 in that trial serious errors were made. Rulings that “cross almost every constitutional guarantee that is granted to any defendant”, as Nascimento explained at the hearing this Tuesday, held by videoconference -something common as a result of the pandemic- and in which Ibar did not participate. Throughout the twenty minutes he had to present his arguments, the lawyer pointed out that, among the irregularities in the hearing four years ago, “the unreliable testimony of eyewitnesses was admitted, the witnesses were improperly limited expert reports and questioning was restricted to key witnesses.”

Other doubts refer to the testimony of a key witness, who described the murderer as a white man or with Latino features, with a mustache and a “unkempt” appearance. In addition, Nascimento has pointed out, one of the twelve members of the jury who decided the verdict in 2019 immediately declared repentance and denounced that he had felt “pressured” and “harassed”.

Prosecutor Deborah Koenig, for her part, rejected Nascimento’s allegations and considered that the trial had been carried out properly. As she recalled, the key witness identified Ibar in a lineup -in which, according to Nascimento, there were also irregularities-. The repentant jury, he indicated, “never said that anyone had done anything improper.”