Legal panel: Free Minneapolis man jailed for life as teen
By ROBIN McDOWELL and MARGIE MASON
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A national panel of legal experts recommended the immediate release of a Black man who was sentenced to life in prison as a teenager nearly two decades ago.
The panel also said Minneapolis police appeared to have suffered from “tunnel vision” while investigating the case of Myon Burrell, who was convicted of killing a little girl hit by a stray bullet in 2002. Furthermore, police ignored witnesses and evidence that might have helped eliminate Burrell as a suspect, it found.
The panel, which was created to examine Burrell’s conviction and sentence, released its report Tuesday. Many of its 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.