Kentucky Innocence Project Exonerates Man Wrongly Convicted

The most overworked, underpaid, unappreciated lawyers in the Commonwealth are the only thing standing between you and a medieval INjustice system.

An order has been signed by a Jefferson Circuit Court Judge vacating the conviction of Edwin A. Chandler for charges stemming from the robbery and murder of a convenient store clerk in 1993. Mr. Chandler was convicted by a jury in 1995 and received a sentence of 30 years. He was incarcerated for nine years before he was released on parole.

Mr. Chandler has maintained his innocence since his arrest in 1993. Fingerprints left on a beer bottle, alleged by the prosecution to have been handled by the perpetrator, were not Mr. Chandler’s. Furthermore, hairs taken from a stocking mask purportedly discarded by the robber, did not match Mr. Chandler’s. The photos recovered from a surveillance tape, a tape erased by the police prior to trial, did not look like Mr. Chandler; and an eyewitness told the jury Mr. Chandler was not the person he saw. Mr. Chandler was convicted on the basis of a statement he gave to the police; a statement he told the courts from the beginning, was coerced.

The Kentucky Innocence Project agreed to investigate his case with the hope technological advancements would help with the hair and fingerprint analysis. While the retesting of the hair did not bear any fruit, the fingerprints taken off the bottle yielded a match to someone already incarcerated in the state on a violent felony. Based on this fingerprint match and additional interviews of the eyewitnesses, Mr. Chandler has been cleared of this crime.

Following the announcement of the exoneration, Public Advocate Ed Monahan, said: “National reports indicate between 4%-10% of the people incarcerated in this country are innocent. Our system must ensure that only guilty people are punished. We are not adequately doing that. Mr. Chandler’s case illustrates the need for common sense reform. Implementing a requirement of video taping confessions, a simple reform already adopted in 500 other jurisdictions, could have prevented this grave injustice.”

Marguerite Neill Thomas, Mr. Chandler’s attorney and the Director of the Kentucky Innocence Project, expressed her relief for Mr. Chandler and his family. Ms. Thomas said, “While it took a slight summer breeze to convict Mr. Chandler, it took a perfect storm to clear his name.” She acknowledged the work of the Chase Law School student who worked on the case, the staff of the Innocence Project who identified the name of the actual perpetrator for the police and were persistent in having the case heard, and to Sergeant Butler of the Louisville Metro Police Department for his diligence in righting this wrong.

The Kentucky Innocence Project is a program of the Department of Public Advocacy established in 2000 to review claims of actual innocence. Students from Chase College of Law and the University of Kentucky College of Law worked with the Kentucky Innocence Project to investigate the cases. To date the Project has been responsible for the release of nine people. Information about these cases is here.

Because of this established program and proven track record, the Kentucky Innocence Project received a significant grant from the Federal Department of Justice to help investigate claims of innocence that specifically involve testing DNA evidence.

The Department of Public Advocacy is Kentucky’s statewide public defender program providing full-time representation to indigent defendants in all 120 counties in over 148,000 cases a year.