On February 15, Great North Innocence Project Managing Attorney Jim Mayer joined friends and family of his very first innocence client to experience the height of any innocence attorney’s career: watching his client walk free from incarceration. The moment Michael Wearry exited Elayn Hunt Correctional Facility in Saint Gabriel, Louisiana, was a long time coming.
Jim (second from right) and Ed Cassidy (far right) pose with Michael Wearry (third from left), family, and other supporters on his release day.
Jim shared, “It was an amazing moment to see this guy outside of prison walls for the first time after only seeing him shackled in a tiny room. He hugged everyone, and it was the sweetest thing to see him with his grandson. That kid was just glued to him.”
While Jim joined Michael’s post-conviction legal team in 2009 as a part of the Fredrikson Law Firm’s partnership with the Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana, Michael’s journey into the winding Louisiana criminal legal system began in 1998. That year, high school student Eric Walber was brutally murdered while out delivering pizzas. Despite efforts by police to find Eric’s killer, the case went cold for two years.
In 2000, a man named Sam Scott approached police implicating Michael Wearry, four other men, and to a much lesser extent himself, as responsible for Eric’s murder. He recounted a series of wildly inconsistent stories replete with incorrect details about the murder. Investigators also said that another man, Eric Brown, placed the same people that Scott had named at the murder scene. Notably, both Sam Scott and Eric Brown were seeking leniency in other, unrelated charges.
Michael Wearry, a 19-year old Black teenager, was arrested. While Eric, who was white, was found deceased in Tangipahoa Parish, which had a 30 to 40 percent Black population at the time, the district attorney decided to charge the crime in Livingston Parish where the crime had allegedly begun. At that time, Livingston Parish had a five percent Black population.
Michael was charged with Eric’s murder and ultimately convicted by an all-white jury. He was sentenced to death.
Once all of Michael’s direct appeals were exhausted, a group of attorneys and paralegals from Fredrikson, including Jim and his partner Ed Cassidy, agreed to investigate Michael’s case to see if there were avenues for post-conviction relief. After contacting Michael’s defense attorney, the team quickly realized that there had been virtually no investigation done by Michael’s defense team at the time of his trial. The defense attorney who represented Michael had never worked on a murder case before, had no second chair, and only met with Michael once before defending him at trial.
“We realized we were going to have to investigate the whole case from the beginning,” said Jim.
Throughout their investigation, it became more and more clear that a terrible injustice had been perpetrated against Michael and that his case was wrought with problems.
Perhaps the most significant detail that the defense failed to pursue was that Michael had an alibi for the night of the murder. He had been attending a wedding reception in Baton Rouge, 45 minutes away from the crime scene. However, Michael’s defense attorney never worked with him or with his then-girlfriend who accompanied him to the wedding to investigate his alibi, nor did his attorney attempt to reach out to other wedding guests to confirm the alibi.
Michael’s defense attorney also neglected to bring up mitigating factors in his life that would influence a jury’s sentencing decision. His attorney did not inform the jury that Michael experienced a trauma-filled upbringing that included extreme physical abuse, that he was diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder, or that his IQ was below average.
In all, Michael’s defense attorney presented his entire penalty-phase defense in less than an hour.
During their investigation, Jim and his team found several wedding guests who confirmed Michael’s alibi and significant exculpatory material that the prosecution never turned over to the defense, including inconsistent statements by state trial witnesses. With all of this new information, Jim and his team felt confident that they could win relief for Michael. They did not anticipate the uphill battle ahead.
In 2013, Jim and the legal team presented evidence over three weeks asking for Michael’s conviction to be vacated and for him to be granted a new trial. The judge denied their request. They then brought their case to the Louisiana Supreme Court, who also denied their claim.
In a last ditch attempt to win Michael a new trial, Jim, Ed, and the rest of the team requested the United States Supreme Court to grant a writ of certiorari to hear Michael’s case.
Michael and his grandson
Instead of agreeing to hear Michael’s case or outright denying the petition, the Court made a decision that nobody, including Jim, anticipated. Based on the written petition, the Supreme Court vacated Michael’s conviction on the sole issue that the prosecution had withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. They noted that because the other evidence used to convict Michael was so weak, this exculpatory evidence would have likely influenced the trial’s outcome.
Jim believes that part of the Court’s decision was rooted in the pattern of Brady violations coming from Louisiana cases that were ending up in front of the Supreme Court.
“I think they saw that Louisiana keeps ignoring their rulings. There’s this long history of Brady violations in Louisiana and prosecutors just being totally cavalier. The Supreme Court had to keep tossing out convictions because of these Brady violations.”
This incredible, hard-fought achievement was not the end of the road, though.
“We had to wait and see what the prosecution was going to do. Originally they told us they would retry Michael, but then they offered him a plea deal. They said he could plead guilty to manslaughter and get credit for time served.”
Michael was left with an almost impossible choice, and one that many clients face once their conviction has been vacated (including several Great North clients): decline the plea deal and continue waiting in prison for a retrial that may or may not go your way, or agree to the plea deal and be released immediately or within a considerably shorter amount of time.
Ultimately, Michael opted to take the plea deal. Jim says it was a challenging decision.
“Michael has very mixed feelings about taking a plea deal. He was not present at the crime and he had nothing to do with it. But, would you roll the dice in front of an all-white jury where the community still remembers the crime?”
As for Jim, he fully believes in Michael’s innocence, but he also understands why he took the plea deal.
“He’s in his forties–he’s got a lot of life left to live.”
Even with the plea deal, Michael would still go on to serve several more years in prison. However, he was moved from the notorious Angola Prison death row, a small mercy until he could be totally freed.
After the experience working on Michael’s case, Jim felt changed. Over the course of seven years, Jim visited Louisiana between 15 and 20 times to meet with Michael. During that time, he built relationships with both Michael and his family.
“Even before the great result in this case, this work made me realize that this is the kind of work that I would love to be doing. I thought, ‘if I could design a career for myself, this is exactly what I would design.’”
When the then-Innocence Project of Minnesota expanded to add a staff attorney position to its ranks, Jim applied. He was hired and joined the team to do innocence work full time in 2019.
Jim (center) with Michael and Michael’s father
Since his release, Michael has been resting and adjusting outside of prison life. In all, he spent 23 years in prison, and a lot has changed in the world over that time. Michael is also involved in an ongoing civil rights lawsuit against the detective and district attorney in his case for coercing a juvenile witness to provide false testimony against Michael. The results of that remain to be seen.
For now, Michael and his family are just glad he is home. Recently, Jim called Michael’s father to check in. Michael is staying with him for the time being. Jim asked Michael’s dad how he was faring since his son’s release.
“Much better now,” he said.