Attorney argues to uphold vacated murder convictions
The attorney for a Latrobe man convicted in Fayette County of the 1977 killings of two men wants an appeals court to uphold a decision that he should be retried in the decades-old case.
“The district court was correct in ruling that (David J. Munchinski) was denied a fair trial in light of the fact that 12 pieces of exculpatory evidence were intentionally withheld from (him) which, had the jury know about, would have resulted in his acquittal and because his conviction was obtained by outrageous, intentional, prosecutorial misconduct,” wrote attorney Noah Geary in a brief filed with the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.
Munchinski, 59, was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of James P. Gierke and Raymond Alford. The men were shot in a home in Bear Rocks in Bullskin Township on Dec. 2, 1977. Munchinski and Leon Scaglione were both convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Scaglione has since died in prison, as has Richard Bowen, a witness who testified he was there when Munchinski and Scaglione killed Alford and Gierke.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan is the second judge to reverse Munchinski’s convictions. In 2004, a visiting judge in Fayette County reversed the convictions and barred retrial, but an appeals court reinstated them.
Deputy Attorney General Gregory J. Simatic appealed Lenihan’s ruling in November, arguing that she should not have considered Munchinski’s appeal because he waited too long to file appeals in the case, and knew about some of the evidence he claimed was withheld for more than a decade.
Additionally, prosecutors argued that the evidence discovered after trial was not reliable enough to overturn Munchinski’s conviction.
Geary, in his response to the appeal, argued that Lenihan was correct in determining that the 12 pieces of evidence that were not turned over to Munchinski before his 1982 trial resulted in “a fundamental miscarriage of justice.”
Among the evidence not turned over, Geary indicated, was a police report that said Bowen may have been in Oklahoma when Gierke and Alford were killed, reports about three other men who allegedly confessed to killing the men and evidence that Bowen received consideration for his testimony, though prosecutors said he only received immunity.
A defense attorney would have investigated those and the other points of evidence, Geary wrote.
“It is very likely, and almost always the case, that exculpatory evidence leads to other exculpatory evidence. Thus, how much more exculpatory evidence would have been discovered by the defense had these pieces of exculpatory evidence not been suppressed is unknown, but such discovery was/is very likely,” Geary wrote.”The actual prejudice suffered by (Munchinski) due to the intentional, deliberate, egregious, patent and ongoing prosecutorial misconduct of prosecutors is simply overwhelming.”
A ruling in the matter will be handed down at a later date.