Purnell v. Delaware
Annotate this CaseIn January 2006, two armed assailants fatally shot Tameka Giles in the back after a botched robbery attempt while she was walking with her husband. After multiple police interrogations in the two years following the murder, Ronald Harris repeatedly told police he knew nothing about the crime and had not been involved. But on the eve of trial and after jury selection, Harris was offered and accepted a plea deal in exchange for testimony against Mark Purnell. Purnell’s court-appointed trial attorney was the same advocate who represented Dawan Harris in a weapons prosecution earlier in the murder investigation. The trial judge did not permit him to withdraw when he brought the conflict to the State’s and court’s attention. Trial counsel failed to investigate evidentiary leads implicating Dawan Harris, did not call him as a witness, and failed to present even then-known or obvious evidence and argument to the jury that would have inculpated his former client. The jury convicted Purnell of Second Degree Murder and all other charges after more than a day of deliberation, and he was sentenced to forty-five years of unsuspended Level V incarceration. In 2009, based on narrow issues presented to the Delaware Supreme Court (which did not include the conflict), his conviction and sentence were upheld. Following the denial of his direct appeal, Purnell filed a pro se Rule 61 motion raising ten grounds for relief, of which the first was an objection to his trial counsel’s conflict of interest. Postconviction counsel filed an amended motion asserting only three grounds, and did not include the conflict claim. The Superior Court denied Purnell’s motion and, again without having the conflict brought to the Supreme Court's attention, the Supreme Court affirmed that denial in 2014. Because postconviction counsel died a few weeks prior to oral argument before the Supreme Court in 2014, it was unknown why the conflict issue was not included in the amended motion. Due to that omission, the conflict claim went before the Supreme Court as one of Purnell’s grounds in an untimely, successive Rule 61 motion. "Ordinarily, having clarified the standards for newness and persuasiveness necessary for relief, we would remand the matter to the Superior Court for an evidentiary hearing and a decision guided by those rulings. But because Purnell has spent more than fourteen years in prison for murder based on a manifestly unfair trial and conviction, and based on his new evidence, viewed as a part of the entire evidentiary record, we are convinced that in this extraordinary case remand for an evidentiary hearing would serve no useful purpose. Instead, we reverse and remand for a new trial."
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