Young Black Man Gets New Trial Based on Violation of Sixth Amendment Right
/In 2013, a young man named Justin Marshall was convicted of the 2009 killing of a 64-year-old landlord of an Iowa City apartment building; he was sentenced to life in prison. But last year, when an appeals court ruled that informant testimony used to seal Marshall’s conviction should not have been allowed at the trial, his conviction was overturned. And in a split 4-3 decision last Thursday, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision, entitling Marshall to a new trial.
Marshall was just 19 when he was arrested for the deadly shooting of John Versypt. According to the Associated Press, there was no physical evidence or eyewitnesses linking Marshall to the crime. The prosecution’s case rested on the testimony of three informants, one of them named Antonio Martin—a jailhouse informant who had previously worked with federal prosecutors on drug cases in exchange for a reduced sentence in his criminal case. Martin elicited a written confession from Marshall after the two men were placed in adjacent cells at the local county jail. In the written statement, Marshall said that he’d killed Versypt by accident and that he hoped that his admission would get him a lesser charge.
