A Colorado judge on Wednesday erased a man’s convictions in a 2009 triple shooting at an Adams County bar and ordered that he be immediately freed from prison, where he has been incarcerated for 15 years.
Prosecutors with the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office also moved to dismiss the criminal case against James Garner, and said they would not pursue new charges against the 51-year-old.
“We are thrilled that Mr. Garner, an innocent man, will be able to return home,” said Jeanne Segil, one of his attorneys with the , an organization at the University of Colorado Boulder that provides free legal services to people who claim to be wrongfully convicted.
Garner, who appeared in court virtually from the Sterling Correctional Facility, lifted his head to the ceiling when Warner officially vacated his convictions. Garner had been serving a 32-year prison sentence.
“He’s overjoyed, in disbelief, feeling every imaginable feeling,” Segil said. “There’s a bittersweet component to it, too. He has been in prison for years for a crime he didn’t commit.”
Garner has long maintained his innocence in the 2009 triple shooting, and challenged his conviction with help from the Innocence Project. He claimed that he was convicted based on faulty eyewitness identification and that his attorneys at the time did not adequately defend him.
In a Wednesday court filing, prosecutors conceded Garner’s claims of ineffective counsel at several points during his 2012 jury trial, largely focused on their responses to the eyewitness identifications.
“My job is to do the right thing on every case, and this was the right thing to do,” 17th Judicial District Attorney Brian Mason said. “We have painstakingly reviewed the transcript of the jury trial, we have heard the new witness testimony… and we believe that there were enough significant issues in this case that the convictions should be vacated.”
Garner was convicted of assault and related charges in the triple shooting at a bar at West 52nd Avenue and Pecos Street on Nov. 22, 2009. He was there celebrating a birthday with several friends when a dispute broke out between Garner’s group of friends and a separate group at the bar around 1:30 a.m., according to court records.
Someone fired at least five shots, and three brothers in the other group were wounded, the records show. All three survived.
Law enforcement zeroed in on Garner as a suspect after finding a pair of glasses he’d dropped when he ran from the bar that night. None of the men who were shot were able to pick him out as the shooter until his jury trial in 2012, when he was seated with his attorneys at the defense table.
New research has shown that delayed eyewitness identification like that is particularly unreliable, Garner’s attorneys argued in court.
They presented evidence about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony during a two-day evidentiary hearing in early April. After that hearing, prosecutors asked for time to reconsider their position, and agreed to return to court Wednesday.
In the prosecution’s most recent court filing, the district attorney’s office acknowledged problems with the way the trial prosecutors asked the brothers whether they would want to convict an innocent man and said that defense attorneys should have objected to that questioning.
The three brothers objected to vacating Garner’s convictions. Mason said Wednesday he is not sure whether Garner committed the shooting.
“Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question,” he said. “The three victims in this case identified the defendant in a jury trial and they were very confident in their identifications of him. And they remain confident. My job is to look at the whole case… and to determine what is just. And my decision was that it was just, in this case, to vacate these convictions.”
He does not expect to bring new charges in the triple shooting, he said.
The filing also noted that a factual error in the case was repeated unchallenged, even as Garner’s appeals reached the highest levels of Colorado’s court system. Both the Colorado Supreme Court and the Colorado Court of Appeals wrote in rulings that Garner’s glasses were covered in spattered blood. They were not.
The Colorado Supreme Court in 2019 upheld the in a 4-3 decision, finding that the identifications of Garner were not “impermissibly suggestive.” The three dissenting justices found that first-time, in-court witness identifications should be handled with more legal guardrails to ensure a fair process.
“At many other stages this could have been rectified,” Segil said. “This never should have happened.”
