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The attorney for a man serving a life sentence for the 1984 murder of gas station attendant Bradley Newell Perry argued Wednesday at a Utah Supreme Court hearing that the DNA evidence in the case has chain-of-custody problems.
Attorney Jennifer Gowans Vandenberg said at least five hairs collected as evidence in Glenn Howard Griffin's case were not documented as coming from the crime scene.
She also said a lawyer who represented Griffin at a critical phase in his trial conducted no investigation into a key prosecution witness.
But Utah Assistant Attorney General John Nielsen countered that authorities kept track of the evidence, including hairs and dollar bills that had blood on them. And police reports show where the evidence was collected, he told the justices.
In addition, Nielsen said Griffin had multiple experienced attorneys defending him before, during and after his trial.
Griffin, now 58, is appealing his first-degree murder conviction and sentence of life without the possibility of parole. The Supreme Court took the arguments under consideration and will issue a ruling later.
Perry was working the graveyard shift at a gas station near Brigham City on May 26, 1984, when he was tied up, bludgeoned with a soda canister and repeatedly stabbed with a screw driver, according to court documents. Two Utah State University students who stopped at the station in the early morning hours say a man came outside and offered to help pump the gas for them.
One of the students gave the man five $1 bills and both saw what looked like dried blood on his clothes, according to court documents. When the second student started heading toward the station to get cigarettes, the man stopped him and said he would get them. The student gave a $5 bill to the man, who returned with the pack and four dollars in change; those bills were among the ones that the first student had used to pay for the gas, court records say.
The students noticed one of the bills had a drop of blood on it that looked fresh and sped down Highway 89 to a pay phone to call police. Court documents say the dollar bill was turned over to an officer.
Perry, a Weber State College student who was going to turn 23 in two days, was found dead. In addition to the dollar bill, police collected multiple hairs from inside the store, according to a brief by the attorney general's office.
Police got search warrants for various suspects but could not immediately tie any of them to the slaying. The case went cold for more than two decades and the officers who collected the evidence have since died.
But crime lab files showed the dollar bill and hairs had been kept in a vault and a cutting from the bill containing blood had been kept in a freezer since 1984, the attorney general's brief says.
After DNA testing in 2005 allegedly tied Griffin to the slaying, Box Elder County prosecutors charged the Logan resident with capital murder, which carries a possible death sentence. A few months later a second suspect, Wade Garrett Maughan, also was charged in the killing.
One of the witnesses at Griffin's 2008 trial in 1st District Court was Benjamin Britt, who testified he was an inmate in the Box Elder County jail while Griffin was housed there and overheard him confessing the slaying to another prisoner.
The two attorneys defending Griffin had a law partner who had previously represented Britt so to avoid a conflict of interest, a third attorney was hired to cross-examine him.
The attorney general's brief says the third attorney had represented another jail inmate two and a half years before the trial who had been Maughan's cellmate and who claimed he heard Maughan say that he, Griffin and another man had committed the murder. The attorney and the cellmate offered the testimony in exchange for the cellmate's freedom but the prosecutor declined, the brief says.
At Wednesday's hearing, Gowans Vandenberg said the attorney had a conflict of interest because of his efforts on behalf of Maughan's cellmate. Nielsen, though, said there was no conflict because the cellmate never testified and got no benefit from his offer to testify.
After 12 hours of deliberation, a jury on Nov. 14, 2008 found Griffin guilty, and he was later sentenced to life.
Maughan, now 60, was tried separately in 2010 on the murder charge and acquitted by a jury. He was charged in 2009 with three counts of obstruction of justice, a second-degree felony, for repeatedly refusing to testify at Griffin's trial. He resolved that case in 2013 with a guilty plea to a misdemeanor count of obstructing justice and was sentenced to a year in jail.
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