Cases
Floyd W. Marsh, Jr.
On October 1, 2011, armed men broke into the residence of an elderly couple in Wilsonville, Oregon, stun-gunned the lady, aged 68, locked her in a closet, ransacked the house and stole a safe reportedly containing over $40,000 in coins and other valuables. Although a convicted drug dealer admitted to this robbery, he was given full immunity in exchange for his agreement to blame it on someone else from whom the (then) D.A. and Sheriff wished to politically distance themselves. That person became the wrongfully convicted, Floyd Marsh.
The attached “Amos Wiese Project” uses public information to compare discrepancies between the State’s star witness’s testimonies between proffer to trial. These significant and numerous material changes were never brought to the attention of the jury. In addition, the Clackamas County prosecutor withheld exculpatory evidence from Floyd’s trial on the guise that… so much was coming in, he could not possibly keep track of it all. Please read the attached, verify and judge for yourself whether justice was served by the dozens of unresolved material issues with the State’s primary witness’s testimony. In the words of the 2011 assault victim, “The trial was not fair.”
Francis Paul Weaver
In 2014, a Clackamas County Deputy District Attorney, Russell Amos, made a made a plea deal with a man named Michael Orren who had pulled the trigger and killed a drug supplier in a robbery gone wrong. Why? The reason was simple. There was someone else whom Amos wanted convicted more. It worked. When Francis Paul Weaver was convicted, he became the third straight murderer convicted in his notorious family, in as many generations. With that came the predictable media spotlight. And the stoic prosecutor predominantly featured in the foreground of the KGW TV news clip as Weaver sobbed to the court, “I never meant anyone to get hurt?” None other than Russell Amos.
Plea deals have traditionally given guilty ones a chance to “come clean,” in exchange for a lesser sentence. Ideally, they allow prosecutors to get at the truth – not squelch it. Instead, in the Weaver case, Amos required the real murderer not to testify at all. In fact, unless the truth (of the known shooter’s involvement) remained concealed from the jury, there would be no deal. Thankfully, in 2020, the Supreme Court of Oregon finally ruled, in essence, that Amos’s deal Amos’s deal was tantamount to witness tampering and as such it violated Weaver’s rights as a defendant, as it denied him access to what was almost assuredly material and exculpatory testimony.
Let us hope that – as a result – Amos reevaluates the deals he makes that get the most violent of criminals back on our streets at their soonest opportunity.
For every person wrongfully convicted, another is wrongfully freed.