Prosecutor: No evidence hiding in wrongful conviction case

ST. LOUIS — St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner on Friday accused Missouri’s attorney general of seeking sanctions against her “because he has no case” in his effort to keep Lamar Johnson in prison for a murder that Johnson has long contended he had nothing to do with.

Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt asked a St. Louis judge on Thursday to sanction Gardner, a Democrat, accusing her of concealing evidence as she seeks to vacate Johnson’s conviction. Johnson was convicted of killing 25-year-old Marcus Boyd in 1994 in an alleged drug dispute.

At issue in the sanction request is forensic testing on a jacket seized from Johnson’s trunk after his arrest. The crime lab in Kansas City, Missouri, recently determined the jacket contained gunshot residue. Schmitt accused Gardner of concealing that evidence, which Schmitt, in a court filing, called material “because it tends to prove that Johnson is guilty.”

In a response motion on Friday, Gardner said the failure to disclose the gunshot residue testing was a simple oversight — and irrelevant since the jacket in question wasn’t used in the crime. Gardner said her office wasn’t even aware of the gunshot residue report until rechecking emails on Thursday, after Schmitt filed the sanction motion.

“It concerns gunshot residue testing conducted on a red-and-black Chicago Blackhawks jacket that was not even used in the crime,” Gardner’s court filing states. “In 28 years, no eyewitness has ever mentioned a red Blackhawks jacket. Considering that Boyd was shot at close range, one would also expect the jacket to be covered in blood spatter. It’s not.”

Her filing called Schmitt’s motion “a weak attempt to change the narrative because the Attorney General has no case.”

Johnson was convicted of killing Boyd over a $40 drug debt and received a life sentence while another suspect, Phil Campbell, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge in exchange for a seven-year prison term.

Johnson claimed he was with his girlfriend miles away when Boyd was killed. Meanwhile, years after the killing, the state’s only witness recanted his identification of Johnson and Campbell as the shooters. Two other men have confessed to Boyd’s killing and said Johnson was not involved.

Gardner launched an investigation in collaboration with lawyers at the Midwest Innocence Project. She said the investigation found misconduct by a prosecutor, secret payments made to the witness, police reports that were…