16 June 2020 :

Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr on Friday filed an amicus brief in county court suggesting that an Alabama death row inmate convicted of killing a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy in 1998 be granted a new trial. Toforest Johnson, now 47, Black, was convicted of capital murder in 1998 for the July 1995 slaying of Jefferson County Deputy William Hardy, who was shot to death while working a part-time security job for a Birmingham hotel. Johnson has been on death row since 1998. Carr wrote that he took no position on Johnson’s innocence or guilt but said there are concerns about his trial. He wrote those include that a key witness was paid a $5,000 reward, a fact not mentioned at trial, and alibi witnesses place Johnson in another part of town at the time of the shooting. Carr said the original lead prosecutor had also expressed concerns about the case. “A prosecutor’s duty is not merely to secure convictions, but to seek justice,” the brief stated. “It is the district attorney’s position that in the interest of justice, Mr. Johnson, who has spent more than two decades on death row, be granted a new trial.” At Johnson’s trial, Violet Ellison testified she eavesdropped on an August 1995 telephone conversation and that she heard Johnson say he and a friend shot Hardy. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 ordered a new hearing to take place on Johnson’s claim of suppressed evidence. Jefferson County Circuit Judge Teresa T. Pulliam in March denied Johnson’s request for a new trial. Pulliam said Johnson’s attorneys had not established Ellison was motivated by the financial reward or that prosecutors knew about it. The case is currently before the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office had no comment on the development, spokesman Mike Lewis wrote in an email.