PANAMA CITY — Prosecutors agree a man convicted based in part on the testimony of a discredited state drug analyst deserves a new trial on his drug charges, but they don’t concede drug evidence in the case should be inadmissible because of possible tampering, according to filing provided by the State Attorney’s Office.
In a response to a motion filed by Walter Smith, the attorney representing Jeremiah Beazley, prosecutors announced they agreed with Smith that Beazley deserves a new trial based on the newly discovered evidence indicating Joseph Graves, a former supervisor of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s drug lab in Pensacola, possibly tampered with or stole pills submitted as evidence against Beazley.
Smith also wanted Judge James Fensom to find the pills are inadmissible in a new trial, but prosecutors aren’t giving up the pills without a fight. Prosecutors now will have to establish the evidence wasn’t tampered with before the trial.
The document, which was filed Thursday, doesn’t quite say the state can prove the evidence in Beazley’s case was tampered with, but it indicates prosecutors are willing to give it a shot.
“The state does not concede that it would be unable to prove chain of custody or submit other evidence that tampering did not occur at a new trial,” it says. “Therefore, the state objects to the defendant’s request that the evidence be ruled inadmissible in any future trial.”
Beazley was convicted at trial last summer of two counts of possession of a controlled substance, tampering with evidence and two misdemeanor counts of resisting an officer without violence. According to testimony at his trial, he was arrested after a deputy saw him sell drugs, but Beazley ran away and threw hundreds of pills, some of which landed in a watery ditch and were unable to be recovered, before he could be taken into custody.
The deputy’s report indicated 378 pills were collected and submitted to Graves at the FDLE lab, but the lab returned only 288 pills. Graves testified that he weighed the pills because the weight of controlled substances determines whether a defendant will be charged with trafficking and face a possible minimum mandatory sentence. Graves said he didn’t count pills submitted to the lab, and the deputy testified he must have either miscounted the pills or entered the wrong number on his report.
Prosecutors also don’t believe Beazley deserves a new trial on the evidence tampering and resisting charges, “as those charges did not involve any analysis by Graves, and the state could have proven those charges beyond a reasonable doubt without his testimony.”
Fensom ordered the clerk’s office to release the evidence in Beazley’s case to the FDLE for retesting. Smith objected to that for several reasons: He argued Fensom had no jurisdiction to release the evidence because the case was on appeal at the time the order was signed; Smith doesn’t trust the FDLE because of the problems created the first time the agency had custody of the evidence; and the order was granted without a hearing, so Smith could request the evidence be retested by an independent third party.
The clerk’s office still has the evidence, so Smith now can ask for a hearing to address his concerns, according to the document.