Myon thanks legal panel for reviewing case
By ROBIN McDOWELL and MARGIE MASON
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A Black man who has spent nearly two decades behind bars says he’s grateful that a panel of legal experts was able to review his case with “fresh, unbiased eyes,” helping to expose serious flaws in the police investigation that put him away for life as a teenager.
The panel, which was made up of experts from around the country for the examination of Myon Burrell’s conviction and sentence, released a report Tuesday recommending the immediate release of Myon Burrell, who was convicted in the killing of a little girl hit by a stray bullet in 2002.
It also said Minneapolis police appear to have suffered from “tunnel vision” while investigating his case, ignoring witnesses and evidence that might have helped clear him.
Many of the panel’s findings mirrored those uncovered by an Associated Press and APM Reports investigation earlier this year. They included unreliable testimony from the sole eyewitness; a heavy reliance on jailhouse informants who received “extraordinarily generous” sentence reductions in exchange for their testimonies; and a failure to retrieve surveillance video from a corner store — footage that Burrell, now 34, has always maintained would have cleared him.
“I am extremely joyful that this independent review team went into this investigation with fresh, unbiased eyes seeking only to find the truth about what actually happened in my case,” Burrell wrote in an email to the AP from the state prison in Stillwater