Torres v. State, Minn.S.Ct., 10/2/2013. I represented Mr. Torres at the evidentiary hearing on this post conviction petition, although I did not draft the petition and I did not represent him on appeal.
Mr. Torres is serving a life sentence for a first degree felony murder conviction. The jury did acquit Mr. Torres of first degree premeditated murder. A co-defendant, Tracy Sailor, cut a deal with the state which obligated him to testify against Mr. Torres. Mr. Sailor claimed that it was Mr. Torres who actually slit the victim’s throat. A third co-defendant didn’t see the homicidal act. At trial, the state introduced Mr. Torres’ Scales statement in which he blamed this third co-defendant.
Mr. Torres and a woman who is identified in the Opinion as “R.T.” hatched a plan whereby R.T. would strike up first a pen pal relationship with Mr. Sailor to be followed by telephone calls between the two. R.T. pretended to be a student who was writing a research paper, and she also pretended to be romantically interested in Mr. Sailor. Eventually, both in some of the letters and in recorded phone calls, Mr. Sailor made some admittedly coded admissions that it was, indeed, he who had slit the victim’s throat, and that he had blamed Mr. Torres in order to get his deal. (Other letters, most notably the first and last ones, maintained that it was Mr. Torres who had actually killed the victim.) These letters and telephone calls – recordings and transcripts – were introduced at the evidentiary hearing. Mr. Sailor testified and flipped the roles of R.T. and himself upside down. Mr. Sailor said that he was just glad for the letters and phone calls and that he was telling R.T. what he thought she wanted to hear – albeit guardedly – just to keep things going.
The post conviction court and Justice Wright (Lillehaug still not participating) concluded that Mr. Sailor’s coded admissions were not reliable in the face of his trial testimony and his repudiation of these coded admissions that he made to R.T.
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