Gilbert Poole walks out of prison in Jackson with Cooley Law School Innocence Project Attorneys Marla Mitchell-Cichon and David Williams.
Photo courtesy of WMU-Cooley Law School
An Oakland County circuit judge this week set aside the conviction of Gilbert Lee Poole, Jr. who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1989.
“I have to say that I didn’t understand what was happening back in 1988 when I came to court to be tried for a murder I didn’t commit,” Pool said at a court before Judge Rae Lee Chabot. “At 22 years old, and a thousand miles away from anyone I knew, I kicked and screamed and stomped my feet and said this is not right.”
Assistant Attorney General Robyn Frankel, director of the state Attorney General’s Conviction Integrity Unit, moved to have Poole’s conviction vacated and requested dismissal of all charges.
Poole was represented by Marla Mitchell-Cichon of the Western Michigan University Cooley Law School Innocence Project, who said Poole’s conviction “was based on unreliable evidence, including a bite mark comparison, which is not based on science.”
DNA testing excluded Poole from the crime scene and implicated an unknown individual,” she said.
The conviction integrity unit is one of the first of its kind, reviewing claims of innocence in counties across the state.
On June 7, 1988, the body of Robert Mejia was found near a running path in Pontiac.
Mejia, who had been stabbed to death, was last seen alive at a Pontiac bar and several bar patrons provided a description of a man who was with Mejia when he left the bar.
Based on those descriptions, composite drawings were posted in the Oakland Press, but no leads developed and the case went cold.
In November 1988, Poole’s then girlfriend implicated Poole in the murder. Despite her inability to provide accurate details about when the crime occurred, she became the state’s key witness.
Dr. Allan Warnick was the only witness to tie Poole to the crime scene through his comparison of Poole’s teeth to a presumed bite mark on the victim’s arm.
Bite mark comparisons have since been debunked by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), according to a press released issued by WMU-Cooley.
Several blood stains were collected from the crime scene, and blood on a stone found embedded in the victim’s body did not match the victim nor Poole, according to the news release. That evidence was never presented at trial.
In 2016, DNA testing of that same sample and other blood samples confirmed that an individual other than the victim and Poole left their blood behind.
At the request of the WMU-Cooley Innocence Project, the conviction integrity unit reinvestigated the case, then moved to set aside Poole’s conviction.
The WMU-Cooley project is part of the Innocence Network, which has been credited with the release of over 375 wrongfully accused prisoners through the use of DNA testing.
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