HUNTINGTON, WV (LOOTPRESS) – In a case that eerily compares to another LOOTPRESS has followed, two brothers are suing government and law enforcement officials for their wrongful convictions.
The pair spent spent a total of 18 years in prison for a murder they didn’t commit, officials determined.
Nathan and Philip Barnett filed their lawsuit in federal court against the Cabell County Commission, and individual West Virginia State Police officials Anthony Cummings, Greg Losh, Kimberly Pack, Mike Parde and Eddie Blankenship.
The brothers, who were convicted at ages 25 and 28, respectively, were exonerated by DNA evidence. Nathan now is 39 and lives in Point Pleasant. Philip is 41 and lives in Monroe, Georgia.
“The wrongful convictions … robbed Nathan and Philip of the primes of their lives,” the complaint is quoted by the West Virginia Record newspaper.
“Their agony over their lost years is compounded by the knowledge that police and prosecutorial misconduct led to their wrongful convictions,” the motion says.
LOOTPRESS and other media outlets have been covering the efforts of Edward Jesse Dreyfuss to overturn his own 2013 Cabell County murder conviction.
Dreyfuss has consistently claimed that the autopsy in his case shows no signs of the beating death prosecutors say he was guilty of.
Dreyfuse has a group of supporters who have rallied to his side, claiming he is telling the truth.
Throughout most of his case, Dreyfuse has blamed Cabell Judge and former Prosecutor Chris Chiles for coordinating a deceptive prosecution and actually helping a Huntington Police officer fabricate “evidence.”
Dreyfuse has been successful in appeals to the supreme court and managed to have Chiles and other Cabell judges removed from the case in favor of Lincoln County Circuit Judge Jay Hoke.
Motions are pending to overturn Dreyfuse’s conviction for murder. Dreyfuse has told LOOTPRESS and others that he never even met the deceased. He has successfully represented himself during most of the hearings.
In the brothers’ case, years after the police investigation grew cold, the complaint says an informant with an extensive criminal history told police his nephew, Brian Dement, a man who struggled with mental health issues had confessed to being involved in the murder. He later recanted. He also implicated Philip and Nathan Barnett as well as Justin Black.
The complaint maintains State Police coerced false confessions from Dement and Black implicating the Barnett brothers. It says officers held Dement and Black overnight, threatened them and gave them nonpublic information about the crime.
Dement gave three coerced confessions, the complaint says, that were inconsistent and implausible. These confessions should not have been accepted by authorities, it says.
Black recanted his false confessions two weeks later. Dement tried to disavow his false statements, but he was threatened with a longer prison sentence and accepted a plea deal, according to the complaint.
Despite no DNA evidence at the crime scene, the Barnett brothers were indicted, arrested and convicted for the August 8, 2002, Cabell County murder of Deanna Crawford.
Only one other witness beside Dement claimed to have seen the brothers with the victim the night of the murder. That was a man named William Scott Harbour, but the complaint says prosecutors failed to disclose that Harbour had multiple open criminal cases and had been offered favorable consideration for his testimony. Also, prosecutors failed to reveal Dement’s uncle was a police informant who had received similar favorable treatment in the past.
But in 2017, new DNA testing on semen found on the victim’s pants and cigarette butts excluded the brothers as matches. The DNA matched a man already incarcerated in Ohio on a violent sex offender charge. As a result, the Barnett brothers’ convictions were overturned, and the charges against them were dismissed by the state. That led to the current lawsuit.
The 39-page complaint details the murder investigation, how the initial investigation went cold, and how the case was reopened five years later based on comments made by Dement to his uncle Gregory Alan Bailey.
Dement’s comments then were relayed to Cabell County Deputy Sheriff Jim “Jimbo” Schiedler, who allegedly helped Bailey get “out of jams” with the assistance of then-Prosecuting Attorney Chiles when he provided useful information, according to the complaint.
The complaint says State Police demanded Bailey wear a wire to record a confession by Dement or they’d charge him with being an accessory to the murder.
This is a developing story that will be updated in LOOTPRESS as warranted.