Pablo Ibar hopes to achieve, at the appeal hearing this Tuesday, that the life sentence be revoked and there be a new trial

His lawyer will allege "contamination" in the main evidence, the shirt with which the murderer covered himself, in which Ibar's DNA was found

BILBAO, 27 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Pablo Ibar, nephew of the legendary Basque boxer José Manuel Ibar 'Urtain', hopes to achieve, in the hearing to be held this Tuesday in the Florida Court of Appeals, that his 2019 life sentence be revoked and the trial be repeated for to prove his "innocence" in the triple murder of June 1994 Casimir Sucharski, owner of a nightclub and dancers Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers.

His lawyer, Joe Nascimento, will allege "contamination" in the custody of the main evidence in the case, the shirt with which one of the authors covered his face, and in which genetic traces of the defendant appeared in very small values. In the previous trial, an analyst assured that the shirt with Ibar's DNA arrived in a bag with the seal open.

The Pablo Ibar-Just Trial Association has indicated, in a statement, that Pablo Ibar is facing "a crucial phase in his struggle to prove his innocence." Tomorrow the Court of the Fourth District of the Court of Appeals, based in the city of West Palm Beach, in the State of Florida (USA), will be the scene of the appeal hearing in which the prisoner of Spanish origin, who spent almost 20 years on death row, will request the revocation of the life sentence he is currently serving and the holding of a new trial "with all the guarantees."

Ibar is currently sentenced to remain imprisoned for life, after being found guilty in 2019 of a triple murder, the authorship of which he has always denied. "I am confident that, after reviewing the evidence as well as the issues and decisions of the court that tried him between 2018 and 2019, the judges will agree that Pablo did not receive a fair trial," says the inmate's lawyer, Joe Nascimento.

The appeal will begin at 2:00 p.m. local time in Florida (8:00 p.m. in Spain), and will take place via videoconference, an increasingly widespread practice in North America due to the pandemic, so neither Ibar's lawyer nor the representative of The Prosecutor's Office will be present at the courthouse.

The procedural act, however, will be broadcast through the official website of the Court of Appeals itself. Nascimento will have only 10 minutes to present the reasons that lead him to request that his defendant be retried. The session is expected to begin with the initial presentation of the lawyer. Subsequently, the assigned prosecutor will intervene, and will conclude with a final intervention reserved for the defense.

Joe Nascimento plans to present twelve reasons why he believes that Pablo Ibar's trial held between 2018 and 2019 was "unfair". The Chamber is made up of Judge Melanie G. May, and Judges Cory J. Ciklin and Jeffrey T. Kuntz, who have had to review 20,000 pages of transcripts. Only the lawyer's brief has more than one hundred pages.

The existence of a "tiny" DNA sample belonging to Pablo Ibar in a T-shirt that was found at the scene of the events and that was carried by one of the perpetrators of the crime, will largely focus the lawyer's speech. The assessment of this evidence constitutes precisely one of the key reasons that he uses in his appeal text, the Pablo Ibar-Just Trial Association has assured.

This biological sample was surprisingly incorporated into the case only a few months before the start of the last trial. Until that moment, all the analyzes carried out had been negative regarding remains linked to Ibar. The genetic traces of the defendant found were also of small values ​​that, according to the defense and experts, could only be the product of accidental contamination during the custody of evidence.

Joe Nascimento hopes that they will ask about DNA at the hearing, because he will be "prepared to show them how the DNA of a man appears in six different areas of the shirt, and that man is not Pablo Ibar". judges that the man who appears in the video who recorded the crime "and rubbed his shirt across his face several times, touched it repeatedly, wiped his mouth and spoke into the shirt for several minutes", so there were saliva on the garment that did not correspond to that of his client.

Nascimento also maintains as cause for the revocation of the sentence the action of magistrate Dennis Bailey, who directed the last process in which Ibar was sentenced to life imprisonment, and who considers that he "violated the constitutional rights of the accused."

For all these reasons, he trusts that the judges of the Court of Appeals, once they have examined all the evidence, as well as "the problems and decisions of the court that tried him between 2018 and 2019, will agree that Pablo did not receive a trial fair", and that he must have "constitutionally guaranteed a fair trial", which would be given "through the annulment of the verdict and the sentence".

Ibar has recently been transferred from the Okeechobee penitentiary center (Florida), where he had been since his death sentence was commuted to life, to another private facility, where he carries out various activities and has started a welding course.

The three judges of the West Palm Beach Court must establish whether Pablo Ibar has the right to "a new opportunity", as happened in 2016, when the Florida Supreme Court annulled the death sentence that was then weighing on him and ordered a new trial to be held, considering that the evidence against the defendant was "flimsy."

On that occasion, the Florida Supreme Court censured "the malpractice" of the lawyer who defended the defendant and concluded that there was no "physical evidence" that connected Ibar with the triple murder charged against him. Once the appeal is concluded on Tuesday, a period of deliberation will be opened among the members of the court.

This phase can last several months and it is not ruled out that the ruling will take a year to be known. In the event that the appeal is not successful in this instance, the defense will go to the Supreme Court of Florida.

Pablo Ibar was found guilty of the triple crime that in June 1994 ended the lives of Casimir Sucharski, owner of a nightclub and owner of the chalet where the crimes were perpetrated, and of the young Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers.

The three were killed by two individuals who broke into the house. The sequence of events was recorded by a video camera located in the living room of the house, which, at a certain moment, captured the face of a young man with Latino features that the Police identified as Pablo Ibar.

However, in the last trial held in 2018-2019, it was proven, even by prosecution experts, that this video did not have sufficient image quality to make any identification.