Ruling on ex-SEAL trainee challenged
By Zachary Reid Published: August 8, 2009
Dustin Allen Turner isn't getting out of jail just yet.
Three days after a Virginia Court of Appeals panel overturned the one-time Navy SEAL trainee's conviction in the 1995 murder of a Georgia college student, the state's attorney general announced he was asking the full court to review the finding.
"I have decided to seek review by the full Court of Appeals in the case of Dustin Turner," Attorney General Bill Mims said in a statement yesterday.
"The three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals was sharply divided. It is imperative that a case of such significance be decided by the full court."
Turner's lawyer, David B. Hargett, said he was disappointed but not surprised.
"I was hoping they would realize that with the evidence we have, in all likelihood it will be resolved in the same manner," he said.
Hargett said he expected it would take at least two weeks for the court to decide whether to rehear the case. He added that if the court does, he expects "many, many more months" before a decision is made.
"It's a waste of time, money and resources," Hargett said.
Turner and fellow former SEAL trainee Billy Joe Brown were convicted in 1996 of the killing of Jennifer Lynn Evans. She left a Virginia Beach nightclub with the two on the night of June 19, 1995. She was strangled to death in a car driven by Turner, and her body was dumped off Interstate 64 in Newport News.
Turner was sentenced to 82 years in prison and Brown to 72 years.
In 2002, Brown said that he alone killed Evans.
At the time, Turner couldn't appeal because Virginia law allowed only a 21-day window after sentencing for new evidence to be submitted. That changed in 2004.
In a 2-1 decision Tuesday, a panel of the Virginia Court of Appeals granted a writ of actual innocence to the 34-year-old Turner, making him the first person to have a murder conviction overturned under the new law.
Evans' mother disputes Brown's change of story but said she thinks the case is bigger than her daughter.
"I think they're right" to ask for further review, Delores Evans said by phone from her home near Atlanta. "It's a very important case, and not just because my daughter was murdered.
"I would hope they would pursue it all the way to the Supreme Court. It needs to be shaken out."
She said she sent the same message to Mims in a three-paragraph letter dated Wednesday.
A spokesman for Mims said he wasn't sure whether Evans' letter had any bearing on Mims' decision to ask for further review.
"It doesn't matter," Evans said. "The important thing is, they're going to do it."
Evans said that aside from the legal implications of the case, she still isn't convinced of Turner's innocence.
"Brown's word is all we have on this," she said. "There's no new evidence."
In her letter to Mims, Evans wrote: "Please don't let one convicted man's changed word stand as qualified and credible 'new evidence' that he alone killed Jennifer. There is no way his latest and changed version (his 'confession') can be proven to be true. It certainly is not irrefutable enough to reach the level of certainty required by the new law."
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Contact Zachary Reid at (804) 775-8179 or zreid@timesdispatch.com.
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