DENVER—A man who once faced the death penalty for a brutal prison slaying has won a new trial after a Colorado judge ruled that prosecutors failed to turn over evidence that could have helped the man prove his innocence.
David Bueno, 46, a former inmate at Limon Correctional Facility, was convicted of first-degree murder in April 2008 in the death of Jeffrey Heird. District Judge Douglas Tallman ruled Friday that prosecutors failed to turn over a letter and prison reports that suggested other inmates killed Heird in 2004.
Tallman said the information bolstered Bueno’s defense and could have affected the trial’s outcome. He said failing to turn over the information “is a violation requiring a severe sanction.”
District Attorney Carol Chambers had sought the death penalty against Bueno, but jurors recommended a life sentence instead. Assistant District Attorney Leslie Hansen said they disagree that prosecutors withheld evidence or that the documents could have helped Bueno.
An appeal will be filed with the Colorado Court of Appeals on Thursday, Hansen said.
Bueno, who was serving a 24-year sentence for burglary, and Alejandro Perez, an inmate serving a sentence for second-degree murder, immediately became the focus of the probe into Heird’s death after investigators found an anonymous note near Heird’s cell naming the two men.
Public defense attorney Derek Samuelson had argued that a white supremacist gang Heird was involved in was responsible for his slaying, because he didn’t warn gang members they were being investigated for smuggling drugs.
Documents obtained by prosecutors but not turned over to defense attorneys during the trial include an inmate “hit” list unconnected to Bueno that names three other inmates who were to be “exterminated” and a report written by the prison’s gang intelligence officer.
The intelligence officer raised the prospect that Heird’s death and the suspicious death of another inmate named in the letter were related. An investigation later found that the other inmate died of natural causes, Hansen said.
“This (inmate) note substantiated the defense theory and validated what we were telling the jury all along,” Samuelson, who is now in private practice, told The Associated Press. “And it was not provided to us in a timely fashion, and had it been, would have resulted in a different result.”
Jurors had become deadlocked after four days of deliberations, an indication that some of the jurors didn’t buy the prosecution’s case, Samuelson said. Jurors returned a guilty verdict after further instructions from the judge, but declined to recommend the death penalty sought by prosecutors.
Hansen said Bueno’s defense attorneys reviewed the prison’s investigation file months before Bueno’s trial, which also contained the documents Tallman deemed were crucial to Bueno’s defense. The documents were found in a prosecutor’s file and turned over to Bueno’s defense team in July 2009.
“I think they saw it, but they didn’t make anything of it. It didn’t mention Perez or Bueno,” Hansen said. “It wasn’t relevant for them” or to prosecutors, she added.
“Now everybody is making it to be the magic silver bullet,” she said, adding that another inmate testified that the “hit” letter is a fake.
The documents were discovered after a judge in Perez’s case, one of Bueno’s co-defendants whose case is pending, ordered a review of a prosecutor’s file. A third man faces a charge of serving as a lookout.
Bueno remains incarcerated at the Colorado State Penitentiary.
Bueno’s case is the third murder case that has been overturned in the past three years after allegations of prosecutors failing to turn over evidence.
Timothy Masters was released from prison in January 2008 after new DNA tests pointed to other suspects. Former Larimer County prosecutors Terence Gilmore and Jolene Blair, who are now judges up for retention, were censured for failing to turn over evidence.
The lead detective in that cases, Fort Collins police Lt. Jim Broderick is accused of lying in the investigation and Masters’s trial, and has been charged with perjury. He has denied wrongdoing.
In the second case, Tim Kennedy was released from prison in May 2009 after a judge threw out his conviction in a 1991 double-slaying in Colorado Springs. Among the reasons, a judge ruled that now discredited evidence was allowed at his trial and prosecutors failed to turn over a jailhouse letter that could have helped prove his innocence.
