The man imprisoned for murdering Marley Lion hopes to overturn his conviction by pointing out two moments in his trial: a judge’s speech about justice and a ruling that barred evidence thought to implicate another suspect.
Justices at the S.C. Court of Appeals in Columbia are scheduled in January to hear oral arguments by Ryan P. Deleston’s attorneys and by prosecutors fending off his challenge.
Deleston, now 34, was part of a trio accused of trying to rob Lion, 17, who had stopped in June 2012 at a West Ashley parking lot to sleep off a night of drinking. Lion was fatally shot. Of the three, Deleston was the only suspect tried for murder; the other men pleaded guilty to a lesser crime.
Caught on a video showing a blurry figure firing into Lion’s car, the brazen shooting captured interest nationwide. It stirred discussions of race: Lion was white, and the suspects were black. His parents were thrust into the public eye as they pleaded for clues until police broke open the case through informants.
Deleston’s appeal has renewed attention on the case. It hinges on the legal implications of a judge’s actions in the courtroom. To his appellate attorneys, the moves thwarted his right to mount a defense, they said in a 44-page brief. They asked for his conviction to be reversed and his case sent back to Charleston for a new trial.
One of the problems popped up at the start of the trial in October 2013, when Circuit Judge Kristi Harrington told jurors that the proceeding would be a “search for the truth.” His attorneys say the jurors’ task was much simpler: to decide whether prosecutors prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
The lead issue, though, centers on Harrington’s choice to exclude evidence that defense lawyers thought supported their theory of co-defendant Bryan Latrell Rivers, not Deleston, carrying out the shooting. Rivers, now 31, robbed and shot a man two weeks before with the same gun used to kill Lion.
He and Julius Perrell Brown, 35, were allowed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Lion’s death. They got 28 years in prison.
It’s significant that the court has set oral arguments in Deleston’s case because many appeals don’t make it that far, said Charlie Condon, a private attorney in Mount Pleasant and former state attorney general. They often are decided earlier in written opinions.
“We have a judicial system that errs of the side of protecting the rights of the accused,” Condon said. “So when there’s a limitation on the defense going into other areas, courts in general do examine that carefully.”
For a while before Deleston’s trial, prosecutors had no evidence naming only one man as the shooter. The video footage was inconclusive. The shooter’s face wasn’t visible.
They turned to the suspects themselves, offering Rivers and Brown the plea deals in exchange for testimony against Deleston.
In the men’s early interviews with the Charleston Police Department, Deleston was the only one who admitted having a hand in robbing Lion, but he claimed Rivers shot the teen.
When they took the witness stand, Rivers and Brown planned to name Deleston as the gunman. They would tell similar stories:
They rode around Charleston that night, hunting for people to rob. With a gun in hand, Rivers took a purse from a young couple on a downtown street.
Later, they decided to rob employees coming out of Famous Joe’s, a Savannah Highway bar near the Ardmore community. Lion foiled their plans by pulling into the lot, so they resolved to rob him instead.
Brown first scoped out the SUV. Rivers and Deleston then passed the gun between each other, as if they were hesitant follow through. Deleston soon took it and knocked on Lion’s window. He retreated when Lion set off a panic alarm but quickly returned and started shooting.
Lion was hit five times.
Before Rivers and Brown gave that account in the trial, the judge turned to the nine jurors and spoke of their task.
Harrington called the trial “a search for the truth in an effort to make sure that justice is done.” Deleston’s lead attorney, 9th Circuit Public Defender Ashley Pennington, objected, but the judge stood by her words.
In the appeal, Chief Appellate Defender Robert Dudek wrote that the jury instruction was a “fundamentally inaccurate” description of the trial’s purpose. It called for jurors to evaluate the quality of evidence instead of focusing on the “straightforward task” of deciding whether the state was proving its case, he wrote. That could shift the “burden of proof” to the defense, Dudek said.
But the judge also told the jury that the burden fell on the prosecutors, Senior Assistant Deputy Attorney General Donald Zelenka argued in his written response to Dudek’s brief. So even if the judge’s other comments were inappropriate, he said, they were harmless.
In the trial, with his early challenge to the judge’s instructions aside, Pennington centered his defense on the alternate theory of the crime.
When Brown first talked with detectives, he told them to consider Rivers as a suspect, not Deleston. Deleston also named Rivers as the killer when he was questioned over a 13-hour span.
But the defense’s main push to pin the death on Rivers rested in the robbery two weeks earlier, when he shot and wounded a local drug dealer.
With jurors in another room, 9th Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson discussed the issue with Pennington and the judge. She didn’t oppose testimony about Rivers robbing the couple shortly before Lion’s shooting. But using the robbery weeks earlier as evidence that Rivers killed Lion was a “stretch,” she said.
To Pennington, evidence that Rivers had once before used the same weapon “in the very same manner” supported his theory.
“To not allow that evidence, (the state is) essentially saying that the defense can’t put up a defense,” he said.
Harrington didn’t agree and told Pennington that he couldn’t bring up the robbery while cross-examining Rivers and Brown. Connecting two crimes with few similarities, she said, would cast “mere suspicion” on someone else instead of directly implicating Rivers in Lion’s slaying.
In his appeals brief, Dudek argued that testimony of the earlier robbery would reveal that the same scheme was used in both crimes. Court rules and the U.S. Constitution allow such evidence, he wrote.
“The similarities clearly outweigh the dissimilarities,” his brief stated.
Highlighting the common threads for the jurors would cast doubt on Deleston’s role as the trigger man, and it would help show that he had just gone along for the ride as others carried out the crimes, Dudek explained.
The earlier robbery still crept into the trial when Deleston mentioned it in his police statements and Wilson brought it up in her closing argument.
Even if Deleston’s defense was allowed to delve further into their theory, it would not have mattered, Zelenka wrote in a 65-page response to the appeal. Deleston admitted to being an accomplice. So even if he were not the gunman, Zelenka wrote, he’s still guilty of murder under the “hand of one is the hand of all” legal principle.
Neither of the lead trial lawyers, Wilson and Pennington, responded to requests for further comment. Soon after Deleston’s conviction, though, Wilson mentioned that an appeal would likely arise and fail.
“I have no doubt,” she said then, “that it’ll be upheld.”
Reach Andrew Knapp at 843-937-5414 or twitter.com/offlede.