Minneapolis man is released after serving 19 years for murder

Shortly after a Minneapolis jury found Marvin Haynes guilty of killing a flower shop clerk in May 2004, he screamed in protest.

“I didn’t kill that man!” Mr. Haynes, who was then a teenager, he shouted as he faced the jury. “They will all burn in hell for that.”

Mr. Haynes, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2005, has maintained he was wrongly convicted after a deeply flawed investigation by the Minneapolis police.

His lawyers have argued that detectives threatened witnesses to get them to implicate Mr. Haynes in the killing, overlooked exculpatory evidence and acted inappropriately when they showed the only witness a series of suspects.

On Monday, the prosecutor who tried Mr. Haynes did something unusual: It asked a judge to overturn his conviction after concluding that Mr. Haynes did not receive a fair trial and that the killer likely remained at large.

“There has been a terrible injustice in this case,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in an interview. “We cannot give Mr. Haynes back the last 19 years in prison, but we can do our best to make things right for him today.”

On Monday morning, prosecutors and Mr. Haynes’ attorneys jointly filed a petition asking William H. Koch, a Hennepin County district judge, to vacate the conviction. Judge Koch agreed and released Mr. Haynes.

The New York Times obtained a copy of the lawsuit ahead of a press conference to announce the decision, expected to take place Monday afternoon.

Mr Haynes, 36, was released days before he was due to appear in court as part of an effort to get a new trial based on new information about the police investigation.

“I always knew I would find a way to get justice,” Mr. Haynes said in a telephone interview from jail early Monday morning, shortly before he was released. “I knew God would lead me through this.”

Mr. Haynes’ release comes as the Minneapolis Police Department enters an era of court-ordered sweeping reforms, following a pair of damning reports from state and Justice Department civil rights investigators.

The investigation was launched after the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. They found that for years, police unlawfully discriminated against black people and committed a flood of abuses that went unpunished because of systemic deficiencies in training and accountability.

When Haynes, who is black, was tried, the top prosecutor in Hennepin County was Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat who is now the state’s top senator. In early 2020, as she ran for president, Ms. Klobuchar faced questions about another flawed murder investigation from that era after a report from The Associated Press. The defendant in that case, Myon Burrell, was released in December 2020 after the Minnesota Board of Pardons commuted his life sentence.

Ms. Moriarty said prosecutors rarely vacate a murder conviction while a judge was considering a petition for a new trial. But after a thorough review of the police investigation, the trial transcript and new evidence, Ms. Moriarty, a former public defender, said she concluded that releasing Mr. Haynes was the right thing to do.

Mr. Haynes was accused of murder Shortly after a gunman walked into Jerry’s Flower Shop in Minneapolis on May 16, 2004, and demanded cash from the two employees inside, siblings Randy Sherer and Cynthia McDermid. The gunman killed Mr Sherer, 55, as Ms McDermid fled the store.

Ms. McDermid told police that the shooter was a black man with close-cropped hair, appeared to be between 19 and 22 years old and weighed about 180 pounds. At the time, Mr. Haynes was 16, had a long Afro and weighed about 130 pounds.

After detectives showed Ms. McDermid a series of photos of suspects that excluded Mr. Haynes, she selected one and said she was 75 to 80 percent certain he was the killer. However, the man in the photo had a solid alibi.

After receiving a second set of photographs, she identified Mr Haynes as the suspect. But there was a big problem: the photo of Mr. Haynes that police provided was two years old and showed him with close-cropped hair.

The case against Mr Haynes was supported by two other witnesses. One was Ravi Seeley, a 14-year-old who told investigators he was near the flower shop when he heard gunshots and saw someone fleeing the scene. The teenager identified Mr Haynes in a line of suspects.

The second witness was Isiah Harper, a cousin of Mr Haynes, who was 14 at the time. The cousin told detectives he heard Mr. Haynes bragging about having committed a robbery the morning of the murder.

In 2022, lawyers for the Great North Innocence Project, which represents people who claim they were wrongly convicted, obtained affidavits from Mr Seeley and Mr Harper questioning the integrity of the police investigation.

said Mr. Seeley in an affidavit that he did not get a clear picture of the person fleeing the flower shop and that “police officers pressured me to make potentially inaccurate identifications and tell the officers what I thought they wanted to hear.”

Mr. Harper’s declaration under oath said he initially told investigators he knew nothing about the murder. But Mr. Harper said he later implicated his cousin after police “threatened me with criminal charges if I didn’t cooperate.”

During the trial, Mr. Harper said he tried to drop the charges on the witness stand, but relented after prosecutors warned he could go to jail. “They were all lies that I thought I had to tell the police to avoid going to jail myself,” he wrote in the 2022 affidavit.

Ms Moriarty said detectives breached their policy on suspect lineups by showing witnesses a photo of Mr Haynes that did not reflect what he looked like when the crime occurred. While suspicious lineups are supposed to be handled by officers not directly involved in the investigation to ensure impartiality, detectives involved in the case conducted some of the lineups, making them “unnecessarily suggestive,” the court said.

Marvina Haynes, one of Mr. Haynes’ sisters, fought for his freedom for years. The effort to overturn the conviction wiped out the family’s savings and has been a source of torment for nearly two decades, she said in an interview.

“Things like this don’t just impact a family, they impact a community,” she said. “If someone is wrongfully convicted, it means there is still a murderer on the loose.”