Wearry v. Perrilloux

As a direct result of Louisiana District Attorney Scott Perrilloux and former Chief of Detectives of the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office Marlon Kearney Fosters’ fabrication of evidence and coercion of a minor to obtain a fictitious eyewitness testimony, Micheal Wearry was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The MacArthur Justice Center is committed to holding police and prosecutors accountable for their profound abuse of power that results in devastating miscarriages of justice, such as Mr. Wearry’s wrongful conviction.

Despite no physical evidence connecting Mr. Wearry to the crime scene, Detective Foster questioned Mr. Wearry about the murder of Eric Walber but found his alibi sound enough to rule him out as a potential suspect.

Two years later, in the face of mounting pressure from local and national attention for D.A. Perrilloux to find a suspect to prosecute, an incarcerated man named Sam Scott claimed to have evidence that implicated Mr. Wearry in Mr. Walber’s murder. Mr. Wearry was then charged, but it became clear Scott’s statement would not hold up in court, as it changed, in materially relevant ways, all four times he recounted it to detectives.

Instead of acknowledging the shakiness of their case, Det. Foster and D.A. Perrilloux attempted to corroborate Scott’s statement by coercing Jeffrey Ashton, a minor at the time who had initially reported that he had seen Mr. Walber get into an altercation at the pizza shop before his murder, into providing false witness statements. Over the course of six interviews, Mr. Ashton was coached to recount seeing Mr. Wearry throw Walbers’ cologne into a ditch and drive away in Mr. Walber’s car the night of the murder. With this falsified evidence presented at trial, Mr. Wearry was convicted, sentenced to death, and was incarcerated on death row for over 15 years.  

Mr. Wearry’s appeal was eventually presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, where his legal team successfully argued to vacate his sentence based on violations of Mr. Wearry’s due process rights during the investigation. 

Despite this, D.A. Perrilloux retried Mr. Weary again and sought to weaponize Mr. Ashton’s vulnerability as a parolee to intimidate him into resubmitting a false witness account.  Instead, Mr. Ashton, then 29, signed an affidavit describing the falsification of his eyewitness testimony when he was a teenager and revealed in an open court evidentiary hearing that he was nowhere near the crime to recount any part of it. 

The MacArthur Justice Center (MJC) filed a civil action for deprivation of rights case against the District Attorney’s office, D. A. Perrilloux and Det. Foster for misconduct that resulted in an innocent man spending nearly two decades behind bars and on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.

The abuse of power by District Attorney Perrilloux and Mr. Foster is an outrage that should disturb anyone who believes in justice. Michael Wearry sat on death row at Angola for fifteen years for a crime he did not commit. Now he awaits retrial in jail on this bogus charge. These law enforcement officials must and will be held accountable. – Jim Craig, MacArthur Justice Center Louisiana Office Director

UPDATE 

The defendants moved for judgment on the pleadings on the basis of absolute prosecutorial immunity, but the district court denied the motions. The defendants appealed, but the Fifth Circuit ruled in Mr. Wearry’s favor, holding that prosecutorial immunity does not protect prosecutors who participate, even after indictment, in the fabrication of evidence and that police are not protected by prosecutorial immunity.