For those of you who have been paying close attention to Tim’s case via the Tim Facebook page, you know the recent development that we found new evidence that will secure Tim’s hopefully soon but eventual release. In 2016, we told you how the foreman of Tim’s jury signed an affidavit where she states that the jury, as part of their deliberations, viewed two videos of pretrial interviews of the alleged victims. The reason why this was such a big deal is because neither these nor any other videos were played during trial and were therefore not evidence. The new evidence we obtained was the fact that the jury foreperson made a request for the video viewing equipment that was not reported to the defendant, granted without litigation, and was not included in the official record as required by law. Before this, we didn’t know how the videos got to the jury room, or how the viewing equipment materialized there, if it was planted beforehand or if the bailiff brought it in without comment. Now we knew that the jury asked to see the videos the prosecutors told them were available to them but were not shown in court.
On January 17, 2017, Tim’s lawyer Samuel Muldavin filed a petition for error coram nobis in Tim’s trial court in Nashville, Tennessee. This was the result of many months of very hard work among Tim, our family, and Tim’s attorneys.
The pdf of the petition is below for anyone who wants to read it for themselves. It is very good. It’s fairly easy to understand but there are a few things it would be good to know before diving into reading it.
If you are not familiar with Tim’s case, please read the information available on this website. Most people reading this already know that the only “evidence” against Tim were verbal accusations. There was no corroborating evidence whatsoever, either physical or otherwise. The videos that the jury watched were not given to Tim prior to or during the trial, and to this date, neither he nor I have seen them. We have learned that these videotaped interviews were highly edited in order to cast Tim in the worst light possible. We have confirmed with jurors that it was the video that convinced many in the jury to change their vote from “not guilty” to “guilty.” These videos were not real evidence but the reason for his conviction. The fact that the jury watched these videos was not recorded by the trial court. Tim did not receive a new trial upon his appeals because the appellate court stated that the jury didn’t watch the videos–that there was no trial court record of the jury watching them so therefore it didn’t happen.
This is not a technicality. The fact is, the state didn’t have the evidence to convict Tim, because he wasn’t guilty, so they had to create inculpatory evidence to show the jury behind Tim’s back. As you will read in the petition, the court was not only complicit in this, but actually helped to cover up their actions by not allowing the juror to testify in 2013 at Tim’s second appeal about watching this extraneous “evidence.”
If you have any questions or would me to explain anything, please contact me. It’s a shocking travesty to see what happened in this courtroom, both publicly and behind closed doors, to this innocent man. You’ll be outraged that this could happen in our country. People don’t believe us until they read the record of the case, and then they still don’t believe it, but have come to terms that this actually happened. Even the attorneys at Kathleen Zellner’s office are regularly shocked that this trial happened the way it did, and they’ve seen just about everything.
Click here to download the pdf: Writ of ECN Stamped Jan 17 2017 Make sure you keep going to the very end to read the juror’s affidavit which is our primary evidence.
There was an evidentiary hearing scheduled for February 17, 2017 at which three of Tim’s convicting jurors showed to testify that they saw videos in private deliberations that were not shown in open court. The state’s attorney Roger Moore put in a last minute motion to dismiss our petition, and an oral argument was heard on this motion on March 22, 2017 by Judge Monte Watkins in Nashville.
Judge Watkins granted the state’s motion to dismiss our evidence of jury tampering. You can read his written judgement here: 06-23-17 Order Dismissing Coram Nobis. He cited no case law to support his decision nor addressed the affidavit of the jury foreperson which said videos not seen in the courtroom were watched in the deliberations. Judge Watkin’s assignment of counsel to Tim at the end of his ruling is unfounded, as a public defender is not supposed to be given to a person on appeal, and Judge Watkins has no authority to assign counsel as Tim has not claimed indigence or asked for court-appointed counsel.
We appealed this decision in the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals with our lawyer of choice Samuel Muldavin from Memphis and were denied in July 2018. We had one last attempt at State remedy in appealing this to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which we were denied in Fall of 2018. We have now exhausted all state remedies and Kathleen Zellner and her associate Nick Curran took over to file our Writ of Habeus Corpus.
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