FAIRBANKS, Alaska — A Kenai judge has granted a Fairbanks man convicted of a 1982 murder last year a new trial because the prosecutor withheld information about weakness of the DNA evidence against him.
Fifty-seven-year-old Jimmy Lee Eacker had been accused of stabbing a woman to death with a Phillips screwdriver in the only unsolved murder in the coastal community of Seward. The case against him relied on an Alaska State Troopers cold case investigation using DNA technology not available at the time of the crime.
That DNA evidence is getting closer scrutiny.
This week Superior Court Judge Anna Moran — the judge who presided over the five-week trial in Kenai last March — threw out the conviction following post-trial motions and evidentiary hearings on the DNA issue.
She did not go as far as to dismiss the charges against Eacker. He remains incarcerated in Kenai on the indictment he was first arrested under in 2007. He previously lived in Fairbanks for at least 10 years.
The state failed to give Eacker’s attorney a laboratory report related to possible contamination of a DNA sample by the laboratory hired by the defense. The state had offered to have a different sample retested by both the state and defense, according to a news release from the state Department of Law.
“It is the responsibility of the state to provide all exculpatory evidence to the defense as soon as the state is able,” said Deputy Attorney General Richard Svobodny.
David Weber, one of two public defenders on the case, said charges needed to be thrown out because the prosecutor had intentionally withheld information.
“The state had been advised by one of its experts that the evidence was not reliable due to the age of the DNA and the storage of the DNA,” he said. “We thought the behavior was so bad it (the case) should be dismissed.”
The crime’s victim, Toni Lister, was 29 when she went missing after a night out with friends. Her body was found about six weeks later in a wooded area near the Seward dump.
An autopsy concluded she had been sexually assaulted and stabbed in the head, chest and neck with a screwdriver.
Eacker was a classmate of Lister’s husband from a Seward trade school.
He is a registered sex offender from a 1991 conviction in Kenai for second-degree attempted sexual abuse of a minor, according to Alaska court records.
The defense team said Eacker’s DNA might be on Lister’s body, but they argue the two had consensual sex. They said the prosecution left out evidence of a second, unidentified, man.
Pat Gullufsen, the prosecutor who originally tried the case, has since retired. Special prosecutor Paul Miovas said he will be in charge of prosecuting a new trial if the state decides to try again.
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Information from: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, http://www.newsminer.com
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