The appeal hearing of Pablo Ibar, the Hispanic-American son of a Cuban mother, sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for triple murder, will take place on February 28 in a Florida court.
At the hearing, the defense lawyer will explain the reasons why he considers that Ibar's sentence should be annulled and that a new trial be held, reported Andrés Krakenberger, spokesperson for the Pablo Ibar Juicio Justo Association, in statements collected by The New Herald.
Regarding the triple murder for which Ibar was convicted, Krakenberger's statement defends Ibar's innocence.
“The three were murdered by two individuals who broke into the house. The sequence of events was recorded by a video camera located in the living room of the house, which, at a certain moment, captured the face of a young man with Latin features that the Police identified as Pablo. However, in the last trial held in 2018/2019, it was proven, even by prosecution experts, that said video did not have sufficient image quality to make any identification,” the statement states.
The court hearing will be in the Florida Court of Appeals for the Fourth District in West Palm Beach, Palm Beach County, via videoconference.
Ibar's lawyer, Joseph Nascimento, will have minutes to request the revocation of the life sentence and the holding of a new trial.
The Pablo Ibar Juicio Justo Association continues to raise funds to finance the appeal. The budget for this appeal is $200,000 and donations can be made on their website.
Last June, Ibar showed confident that the Florida Court will order a repeat trial to which he was subjected in 2019.
Pablo Ibar, born in Florida to a Spanish father and Cuban mother, was accused of triple murder of a nightclub owner and two dancers, which occurred in 1994 in the city of Miramar, in Broward County.
In 2000, he was sentenced to death, which was overturned in 2016 by the Florida Supreme Court. by rating the evidence as “very weak”. The judge ordered a repeat trial, which took place in 2019, but he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
According to his lawyer, the appeal presented tries to demonstrate that the process has been plagued by irregularities that require the repetition of the oral hearing.
Nascimento assures that the court-appointed lawyer Ibar had in 2000 “did not do his job well, as he did not request expert facial recognition evidence in relation to a video in which the events were recorded, which led to his conviction.”
The lawyer stated that, after the second trial in 2019, a member of the jury reported that he was pressured, and that later it became known that others who intended to declare him not guilty also received pressure.
One of the main reasons the lawyer alleges for a new trial is that the Police influenced a witness, a neighbor of the victims, to identify Ibar.
According to Nascimento, 20 days after the crime, the Police showed that witness six photos and he only identified two men who were unshaven, one of them Ibar. Then, in the identification lineup, six people appeared, and the Spaniard was the only one who appeared in the photographs that the Police previously showed him.
The lawyer believes that this witness was not reliable enough to be accepted at trial.
Other arguments concern DNA evidence, possible contamination of evidence and lack of impartiality by Judge Dennis Bailey.
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