Global Courant
DETROIT (AP) — Prosecutors on Thursday dropped murder charges against a man who served nearly 21 years in prison for shooting two hunters dead in Michigan.
Jeff Titus was released from prison in February when authorities acknowledged that critical information about another suspect — an Ohio serial killer — had never been shared with his trial attorney in 2002.
After looking at the case for three months, Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeff Getting said Titus will not face a new trial.
“This is the right thing to do,” Getting told reporters.
At the same press conference, 71-year-old Titus said he is “really innocent”.
“You can put me on the rack, the truth serum, whatever. I did not do it. … I didn’t shoot those people,” Titus said.
Doug Estes and Jim Bennett were shot to death near Titus’ mansion in 1990. Titus was cleared as a suspect – he had been hunting deer 43 kilometers away – but twelve years later, after a new team of detectives had reopened the case.
There was no physical evidence against Titus, who was portrayed as a hothead who disliked intruders.
The Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan law school was working to overturn Titus’ convictions when a dusty 30-page file from the original investigation was discovered at the sheriff’s office. It was a blockbuster: It referenced a deputy suspect, Thomas Dillon of Magnolia, Ohio.
That information was never shared with Titus’ trial attorney, a fundamental violation.
Jacinda Davis, at the TV Network research discovery, and Susan Simpson, via the podcast ‘Unknown’, had expressed doubts about Titus’s guilt and raised questions about Dillon’s possible role.
Simpson saw the Dillon file at the sheriff’s office and informed the Innocence Clinic.
Getting, who was not the plaintiff when Titus was indicted, said the trial was deeply flawed and key people who testified in 2002 are now deceased.
“I don’t know who ended up killing Mr. Estes and Mr. Bennett,” Getting said. our constitution requires.”
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Dillon died in prison in 2011. He was arrested in 1993 and finally pleaded guilty to killing five people in Ohio who was hunting, fishing, or jogging from 1989 to 1992.
Titus could be eligible for more than $1 million under a state program that compensates the wrongfully convicted.
Titus is “actually innocent,” his lawyer, Mary Chartier, said. “Mr. Titus can do many things, but he can’t be in two places at once. He couldn’t have committed these murders.”
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