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Free after 15 yrs on death row
05/12/2007 21:14 - (SA)
Chattananooga, Tennessee - In a retrial, a jury on Wednesday acquitted a man who spent more than 15 years on Tennessee's death row for the fatal shooting of a woman.
Jurors agreed with defense attorneys who said 55-year-old Michael Lee McCormick was lying when police secretly recorded his confession.
His retrial came after an appeals court decided he had inadequate defense counsel at the 1988 trial where a jury sentenced him to death. DNA test results in 2001 showed that a hair used to place him at the scene of the killing could not be his.
McCormick was convicted in 1987 of the Valentine's Day slaying of Donna Jean Nichols, 23. Nichols was shot in the head and hand and her body dumped in a mall parking lot.
Prosecutors contended the slaying was intended to keep her from going to police about a robbery McCormick supposedly committed with her brother.
McCormick's attorney, Michael Richardson, said in his closing argument on Tuesday that the only prosecution evidence was McCormick's recorded confession secretly obtained by police who "set up a man they knew to be an alcoholic and a notorious liar."
- SAPA
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