Three decades after a Jacksonville man was sentenced to die for killing a teenage drug dealer, the Jacksonville police and prosecutors are facing increasing pressure to produce documents that could undermine the credibility of their key witnesses – and potentially blow up the case.
In the order by U.S. District Judge London Kite, the sheriff’s office, which built the murder case, was given until Oct. 27 to comply – or explain why they didn’t.
The documents relate to Kenneth Hartley’s 1993 trial in the murder of 17-year-old Gino Mayhew. An investigation by The Florida Trib titled Cold-Blooded called into question the credibility of multiple witnesses against Hartley and his two co-defendants, especially that of a man known by police to be willing to lie under oath.
Police confidential informant Sidney Jones was the star witness against Hartley, and the jury was not told two essential facts about his past: that he had previously been “blackballed” as unreliable by Jacksonville detectives, with whom he had worked for years informing on drug dealers, and that he had once been convicted of perjury for his false testimony in a murder case…