10th Circuit vacates conviction of 'Innocent Man'
Jul. 16—A federal appellate panel vacated the conviction of a man found guilty in 1988 of kidnapping and killing a woman based upon trial evidence a federal judge found "unreliable, contradictory, uncorroborated or simply nonexistent."
Karl Fontenot was convicted in Pontotoc County for his alleged involvement in the death of Donna Denice Haraway. He was released from prison in 2019 after serving 34 years for a crime that garnered national attention.
The convictions of Fontenot and Tommy Ward, whose appeal of a conviction for the same crime remains pending, have been scrutinized for years. The crime, investigation and trials have been the subject of numerous books, including John Grisham's "The Innocent Man," which was produced as a six-part documentary on Netflix.
The men's convictions were based almost entirely on "dream confessions" secured after hours of interrogation by Ada police and state agents. Investigators have been described by documentarians and defense lawyers as "desperate" in their to solve Haraway's disappearance in 1984 — two years after the unsolved rape and murder of another woman in the small, central Oklahoma town.
U.S. District Judge James H. Payne of the Eastern District of Oklahoma overturned Fontenot's second conviction and his sentence of life without parole. In a 190-page opinion, Payne found Fontenot had "established the actual innocence gateway," which removed any procedural barriers to his pursuit to have his conviction and sentence vacated.
Two of the three judges on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals panel agree with Payne's determination. They state in the majority opinion that by the time investigators found Haraway's body it had become "apparent that many of the details provided in the confessions" made by Fontenot and Ward "were false."
The majority notes in its conclusion the state's interest "in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done." In their determination, "Mr. Fontenot did not receive the benefit of that interest."
Fontenot renewed his efforts to overturn the 1988 conviction learning about police reports made public for the first time nearly 35 years after Haraway's disappearance and murder. The "newly discovered" evidence turned up when Ward subpoenaed documents requested in 2017 by Fontenot's lawyers.
Ada officials — from the former police chief, a 38-year veteran of the force, to the city attorney and assistant city manager — were unable to explain the whereabouts of the three boxes of evidence before December 2018. Former Ada Police Chief Mike Miller, who retired days after testifying in federal court, said he was unable to remember anything about a subpoena he received in 2017 from Fontenot's appeals lawyers.
Three boxes of evidence, which included hundreds of pages of investigative reports produced by Ada police during the late 1980s, were cataloged for the first time in 2018. Miller and other city officials said those boxes might have been stored in an old jail cell or at a general maintenance facility.
The state has 120 days from the date of the decision, which was dated Tuesday, to decide whether it will retry Fontenot a third time.
