At sixteen, Myon Burrell was wrongfully arrested, charged, and convicted for a crime he did not commit. The person who committed the murder has confessed. Myon was given a life sentence and has been in prison ever since. It has been over 17 years. Myon has an alibi – the police never investigated. There is no physical evidence linking Myon to the crime.
On November 22, 2002, eleven-year-old Tyesha Edwards was killed in a senseless tragedy after she was struck by a stray bullet in a dispute between two young men alleged to be associated with rival gangs.
Myon has now spent over seventeen years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Contrary to the County Attorney’s insinuations, this case has nothing to do with politics, including Senator Klobuchar’s recent presidential bid. Myon’s case is about one thing and one thing only: freeing an innocent man.
The County Attorney’s Office insists in its press release that it is focused on the facts, yet it has failed entirely to rebut the facts set forth in the Associated Press story that shed new light on Myon’s case on February 1, 2020. The facts reveal a very different account from what the County Attorney’s Office presented in its press release. Indeed, while Myon was convicted by a jury in his first trial, at least two of those jurors have voiced reservations about the correctness of their verdict.
Senator Klobuchar, who was the Hennepin County Attorney when Myon was initially charged and convicted, has rightly called for a reexamination of all the evidence in Myon’s case, both old and new, and has now said “justice requires an independent investigation”, which we commend because the evidence, both old and new, overwhelmingly demonstrates Myon Burrell’s innocence.
The County Attorney’s Office misstates the record of Myon’s alibi defense. In fact, Myon told detectives in the first interview after his arrest that he was not involved in Tyesha Edwards’ murder and that he was at Cup Foods at the time she was killed. Indeed, Myon provided the name of an acquaintance who spoke with him outside Cup Foods and encouraged the police to secure the surveillance video from Cup Foods to confirm that he was there. Yet, for reasons unknown, the police failed either to follow up concerning this alibi witness or to obtain the potentially exculpatory surveillance footage.
Instead of focusing on its own investigative errors, the County Attorney’s Office points to Myon’s statement during that initial interview that he had been with his mother in Bemidji on the day in question. That statement, which Myon promptly corrected, was made in the context of a lengthy interview in which the police denied thirteen requests by a sixteen-year-old, terrified boy to have his mother present. Those abusive interrogation techniques led in part to Myon’s first conviction being overturned on appeal.
In any event, the alibi that Myon presented in that first meeting is the alibi he is still advancing to this day. Three women have separately confirmed that they saw Myon outside the Cup Foods that day, including the woman who Myon mentioned to the police. Myon’s current defense team has supplied the County Attorney’s Office with affidavits from each of these three women. Based on these statements, Myon could not have been at the site of the shooting when it occurred.
Further readins–You can share this Press Release from Myon’s lawyer that details Myon's innocence.
Burrell has spent most of his life in prison. He believes authorities knew that he was innocent all along.
The County Attorney’s Office points to the testimony of the intended target of the shooting as central to what it wrongly describes as a strong case against Myon. In fact, the testimony of that witness, Timothy Oliver, was implausible at the time it was offered at Myon’s first trial and has since then been wholly discredited.
Oliver’s testimony was always questionable at best since his eyewitness identification of the shooter relied an implausible set of facts. Specifically, Oliver testified that he visually identified Myon when, after being shot at several times, he exposed himself and walked toward the shooter unarmed. Common sense dictates that anyone in that situation would have sought shelter, not walked toward the shooter. Unfortunately, Myon’s trial attorney failed to seriously cross-examine Oliver on this implausible story.
Further, we now know from two of Oliver’s close friends who were present during the shooting that Oliver lied in naming Myon when, in fact, Oliver never saw the shooter. One of the friends, Anthony Collins, signed a statement saying that he saw Oliver laying on the ground such that he could not see who was shooting. Collins also stated that Oliver was armed at the time and thus would have shot back had he seen the shooter. The other friend, Antoine Williams, signed a statement saying that Oliver told him immediately after the shooting that he did not see the shooter. Williams also said that he was prepared to testify for the defense at Myon’s second trial until one of the lead homicide detectives pressured him to reverse course shortly before he was set to testify.
As another alleged point in favor of the case against Myon, the County Attorney’s Office points to the testimony of an informant who claimed that Myon confessed to him while they were in jail together. In fact, jailhouse informants are notoriously unreliable witnesses since they have strong incentives to lie in order to get more favorable treatment in their own cases.
In Myon’s case, the state used a string of jailhouse informants, almost all of whom were rival gang members, several of whom were serial informants, and one of whom suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and admitted to hearing voices. Not surprisingly, two of these witnesses have told investigators that they lied at trial, with one of them indicating that the police fed him the details of a statement against Burrell.
Listen to a Minneapolis police detective tells a man brought in for questioning on an unrelated shooting that the officer would pay “major dollars” for any names of suspects →
The County Attorney’s Office wrongly claims that Myon’s co-defendants, Ike Tyson and Hans Williams, initially told police that Myon was in the car with them during the incident and that Myon was the shooter. In fact, neither man initially placed Myon in the car with them or stated that he was the shooter. It was only after being repeatedly told Myon’s name by police that one of them said he even saw Myon that day. While Tyson was eventually pressured into naming Myon in connection with his own guilty plea, Williams has never stated that Myon was involved.
Notably, in connection with their own plea agreements, both Tyson and Williams were prohibited from testifying in Myon’s trial such that Myon could not call as witnesses the two people with the most direct knowledge of what happened that day. They did, however, both testify at Myon’s second trial that Myon had no involvement whatsoever. Indeed Tyson has since that time consistently held that he was the actual shooter and that Myon was not there, even though it meant Tyson taking personal responsibility for the actual killing and even though testifying against the government could have put his own plea agreement at risk. Tyson’s claim to be the shooter is particularly compelling since he has offered specific details about the shooting that only the actual shooter would know.
It’s like, it’s like a whole ‘nother burden to carry after from what I already done. I already shot an innocent girl. And now, an innocent guy – at the time, he was a kid, is locked up. For something he didn’t do.
-Ike Tyson, speaking on his confession in an ABC video.
24 February 2020
Watch Ike Tyson speak on tragically taking the life of Tyesha Edward’s life, a crime that Myon Burrell has been wrongfully serving life for.
The foreman of the jury that convicted Myon Burrell for the murder of Tyesha Edwards in 2003 has stepped forward to say that new evidence uncovered by a recent Associated Press investigative report has caused to regret the conviction, which he now calls a “miscarriage of justice.” The case has come under renewed scrutiny after Minnesota Senator and presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar, who was the country attorney at the time, cited her office’s prosecution of the case as an example of how she had served the black community.
In this 16 minute long interview, McClean details his views on the case and why he hopes Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman reopens it.
Interview conducted by WCCO. 02 February 2020.
“I do feel badly. I feel, for lack of a better word, that we were misled. Maybe we should have taken more time, maybe we should have said we couldn’t decide.”
Jury foreman, Joe McLean told the Associated Press. 31 January 2020.
Hear Joe' McClean’s present-day message to Myon Burrell and Myon’s family, from an interview with Jared Goyette of WCCO. 02 February 2020.
Paul Fedor told AP there were many aspects of the trial that troubled him.
Although jurors never visited the scene of the shooting, he said, he found it difficult to believe that Burrell, who is 5-foot-3, could have fired a handgun over a 5-foot wall, as prosecutors claimed.
But Fedor said he finally “collapsed.”
“I held as long as I could,” he said. “It’s weird. You think you can do it, you can hold on, but you’ve never been in that situation.”
Interview from the Associated Press. 31 January 2020
I want to be free, actually free. Have the opportunity to exist. I want to be able to get up, and go outside. I haven't been outside past 9:30pm in 17+ years.
I want to see the moon at night - I haven’t seen the moon in 17 years.– Myon Burrell on a phone call, when asked what people should know about him. 15 March 2020.
ABC's Linsey Davis speaks with Myon.
