PANAMA CITY — A judge Thursday ordered a new trial for a man convicted of drug possession based in part on the testimony of a discredited drug analyst but left evidence tampering and resisting police charges standing.
Judge James Fensom’s order was a win for prosecutors because it doesn’t throw out the felony tampering with evidence charge, said defense attorney Walter Smith.
“It looks like it’s going to be a long, hard slog,” Smith said. “They’re not giving an inch on this.”
The order vacated the jury verdict on two of the five counts against Jeremiah Beazley, and grants him a new trial on the two counts of possession of controlled substance.
The new trial was granted because newly discovered evidence that Joseph Graves, the former supervisor of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Pensacola drug lab, might have tampered with the pills investigators submitted to the lab for testing.
During Beazley’s trial in July, there was a discrepancy in the number of pills the Bay County Sheriff’s Office investigator submitted to the lab and the number of pills the lab returned. The difference was 90 pills.
The investigator testified he’d either miscounted the pills or made an error in his written report, and Graves testified he didn’t count the pills that were submitted to the lab.
Smith represented Beazley in the trial and has for now at least re-enlisted in Beazley’s defense. He had sought to have the evidence ruled inadmissible in a new trial, but Fensom disagreed.
Smith can argue that Graves tampered with the evidence and so it should be suppressed, and at that point prosecutors will have to establish that there was no tampering.
Prosecutors conceded in a written argument filed earlier this month that Beazley was entitled to a new trial on the drug charges, but they argued they could have convicted him of evidence tampering and resisting an officer without violence without any testimony from Graves.
Fensom found that was true, because the law says prosecutors need only prove that Beazley knew an investigation was underway or was about to begin when he threw the pills in a watery ditch while fleeing law enforcement just before his arrest. There’s no requirement that the evidence be a controlled substance, he noted.
Prosecutors called Fensom’s decision a “commonsense order” in a statement released Friday.
“We acknowledged in our response to the motion that Jeremiah Beazley deserved a new trial based on tainted evidence. We disagreed, however, that Beazley should be exonerated. He should be held accountable for the drugs that we can show were in his possession at the time of his arrest. Judge Fensom issued a commonsense order and we will be ready to take Beazley to trial on his drug-possession charges upon his return to Bay County.”
But Smith said he was irked that he won’t be able to present “the whole story” to jurors in the event of a new trial. He won’t be able to argue his client is not guilty of the tampering felony for which Beazley was sentenced to the maximum five years. He is now in state prison.
He thought all the charges should be retried because jurors might be inclined to pardon Beazley of tampering in light of evidence that the state itself tampered with the evidence.
“If you’re so confident try it again,” he said. “Let them hear the whole story and see if they convict Jeremiah Beazley of tampering.”
Smith said prosecutors are more interested in preserving a conviction than ensuring a just outcome.
“We’re more concerned about justice than convictions, and in this case we’re absolutely concerned about preserving the conviction because the jury determined that justice was best served through the conviction of this defendant, which is why they found him guilty of some of the charges we brought, but not all,” said Greg Wilson, felony chief for the State Attorney’s Office.
About seven months after Beazley was convicted, Graves was arrested on suspicion of stealing pills from the lab. Graves now faces the same trafficking in controlled substances and evidence tampering charges originally leveled against Beazley.