Appeals stretch 4 decades for a prisoner convicted on little police evidence

NEW KENSINGTON, Pa. — The four men who put Steve Szarewicz away for murder all changed their stories at one time or another, yet Szarewicz still sits behind bars. That’s where he has been for almost 43 years.

A jury convicted him of killing Billy Merriwether, 25, who was shot twice in the back of the head and once in the chest, his body left facedown off a country road in western Pennsylvania on a rainy February morning in 1981.

There were no fingerprints, no eyewitness testimony and no DNA evidence linking Szarewicz to the scene. Investigators never found the murder weapons. Instead, the case rested on the words of four jailhouse informants who all testified that Szarewicz confessed to them.

Three of the four recanted: one in an interview with a famed newspaper reporter; one in a written statement to defense investigators; and another to Szarewicz’s lawyer, who signed an affidavit recounting the exchange. Another inmate told the court the fourth witness against Szarewicz fabricated his story to settle a score.

Nevertheless, a Pittsburgh jury in 1983 found the informants’ testimony believable enough to convict Szarewicz, despite qualms they voiced to the judge about the lack of physical evidence.

Today the conviction is still on appeal, with Szarewicz asking the state Superior Court to reduce his life sentence to 10 to 20 years, effectively setting him free.

The Pennsylvania Innocence Project has taken a keen interest in the case, particularly because of how heavily prosecutors leaned on the jailhouse informants’ testimony. A national database of more than 3,400 exonerations since 1989 includes more than 200 in which jailhouse informants played a role in the wrongful convictions.

Prosecutors’ use of informants has undergone “some sea changes in the last 40 years,” driven by concerns about their reliability, said Marissa Boyers Bluestine with the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school.

“If you have a strong enough case by the prosecutor, they don’t want to use an informant, that’s not their ‘go-to’ evidence,” she said.

Complicating matters for Szarewicz, Pennsylvania has one of the nation’s strictest frameworks for criminal appeals and post-conviction procedures, said Liz DeLosa, a lawyer with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project who has spent years investigating Szarewicz’s case.

For instance, the state has no way to waive procedural issues, even in the face of…