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Floyd’s convictions are reversed!

The Innocence Foundation wishes to convey its deepest gratitude for the exceptional work of Mr. Erik Eklund, Floyd Marsh’s attorney who took on his post conviction relief case last year after Floyd’s appellate attorney failed to preserve Floyd’s rights under a pending case, Ramos v. Louisiana. That landmark 2020 Supreme Court decision rendered non-unanimous jury verdicts (such as Floyd’s) to be illegal, ironically coming out just four days after Floyd’s Appeal was rejected without its benefit. Nonetheless, Mr. Eklund successfully reopened Floyd’s case on Ramos’s merits. On February 17th, 2022, Mr. Eklund filed the Department of Justice paperwork, reversing all of Floyd’s convictions! 

What’s next?

So he gets to go home, right? Not quite. The message sent to Clackamas County District Attorney’s office was such that they screwed up Floyd’s 2017 trial and need to start over. As a result, they took physical custody of now stroke-victim Floyd Marsh on February 23rd, 2022, remanding him back to Clackamas County Jail. Subsequent actions seem to indicate the politically motivated Deputy D.A. Russell Amos is for now keeping his options open to retry Floyd. The Innocence Foundation maintains that running Floyd Marsh, the unhappy robbery victims and the Oregon taxpayers through a second showboating two-week trial simply to bolster Amos’s media opportunities, is fiscally reckless and morally irresponsible.

Floyd bailed out of jail on April 6, 2022, pending his new trial.

How did we get here?

Can we be real for a moment? It’s widely understood that Floyd’s sole crime lay in embarrassing his former boss, Sheriff Craig Roberts, by being falsely arrested in Chicago, early 2014, for pot. Although the judge dismissed that case due to the arresting officer’s unethical behavior (he lied), the damage to Mr. Roberts’s reputation had been done, and he was out for revenge. Near the end of 2014, C.C. D.D.A. Russell Amos colluded with known drug dealer Gerald Wiese to blame Wiese’s desperate 2011 home-invasion robbery (perpetrated against my family) on Floyd Marsh. In exchange, Russell Amos cozily arranged for Wiese’s total immunity for numerous charges associated with the robbery, plus drug charges stemming from large amounts of meth, heroin, cocaine and illicit steroids found in Mr. Wiese’s possession in 2014. Gerald Wiese was not required to pay restitution for what he stole. Since Floyd’s 2017 trial, Gerald Wiese has been rearrested many times for his ongoing drug trade. Somehow, this D.A.’s sweetheart never gets much time at all. And to this day, no one has been been held accountable for the robbery attack with a deadly weapon on Zdena, my dear co-parent.

The C.C.S.O. and the C.C.D.A. knew from the beginning that Floyd Marsh was innocent. If otherwise, why did investigators state up front and on the record that their primary objective was – not to find the truth but rather – to “build a strong case against Floyd,” only to later admit on the stand they failed to verify anything Gerald Wiese told them? Why did they repeatedly threaten that I would be in trouble if I brought forth evidence in Floyd’s favor? Why did prosecutors disobey (for many years) court orders to produce exculpatory evidence in their possession? Clearly, they did not want the truth – or even a fair procedure. And despite receiving copies of the Amos/Wiese Project years ago, they took no action against their star witness for his perjury.

1/05/2024 Latest Update

Floyd’s new trial was set to begin Tuesday, January 9, 2024. Instead, Clackamas County DDA Russell Amos filed a Motion to Dismiss, which the judge granted.

In 2023, Floyd’s retrial was postponed over 100 days to allow for DNA testing that had never been run on the 2011 crime scene. The zip-ties used to tie up the victim of the 2011 home-invasion robbery contain unidentified male DNA, against which Floyd was tested and excluded. Simply put, it’s not his. Rather than concede to the DNA analysis, the prosecutor, Russell Amos, gave the court a different reason for his dismissal of all charges. Rather, he could not locate his star witness. But this, like so many of his statements to the court, were false. In fact, we would soon learn that the star witness, Wiese, has had the same phone number, address and job for three years by then. When Amos put out a material witness warrant on Wiese leading to the retrial under the guise he could not locate him, Wiese actually phoned the DA’s office and offered to turn himself in; he was told that was not necessary. So, how can it be true that Wiese being unavailable was the reason Floyd’s trial was cancelled? Rather, Amos knew the new evidence we had collected over the years would embarrassingly impeach his star witness. He could not put him on the stand again, so discredited. And this time, Amos would not be dealing with Brian Schmonsees, arguably the world’s worst public defender, but rather with a defense team who believed in and was motivated to prove Floyd’s innocence.

How ironic that, even on the eve of dismissal, Amos cannot be truthful even about his reasons for it.

Shortly after the dismissal, Floyd worked to have his criminal records completely expunged and sealed. This process takes months at best, yet this means his wrongful conviction can no longer keep him from renting, or from employment opportunities, as it had.

Further, Floyd’s case was meticulously vetted and he is now on the National Registry of Exonerations. Click the link here to read that story: Floyd Marsh, Jr. – National Registry of Exonerations

Finally, to watch a 15-minute video on our story and how it relates to causes of wrongful convictions, please visit our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufqIhPwM5IM&ntb=1&msockid=ccbba39b01eb11f0a4f51b394bdff43a\