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A judge has refused to dismiss the case against a Utah County man whose murder conviction was recently overturned due to incorrect home measurements.
Attorneys for 34-year-old Conrad Mark Truman had asked 4th District Judge Samuel McVey to toss the case for what they deem "outrageous government misconduct."
Truman is charged with murder, a first-degree felony, and obstructing justice, a second-degree felony, in 25-year-old Heidy Truman's 2012 death.
A jury in 2014 convicted the husband of the crimes, but McVey ruled in August that Conrad Truman would receive a new trial because jurors relied on incorrect measurements of the couple's home when they found him guilty of a holding a gun to his wife's head and pulling the trigger inside their Orem residence on Sept. 30, 2012.
His new trial is scheduled to begin on Feb. 1.
Truman's attorneys, Mark Moffat and Ann Marie Taliaferro, had asked the judge to toss the case altogether and bar the state from prosecuting it again, arguing that police and prosecutors covered up mistakes, allowed false testimony at trial, and hid or destroyed evidence that could have helped their client.
The defense team alleged that prosecutors knew there was no financial motive for murder, that the home diagrams were wrong and that Conrad Truman's statements to police were not inconsistent — but presented it to a jury anyway. They also argued that prosecutors knew there were problems with the police's collection of gunshot residue, so they presented incorrect testimony that GSR testing was not reliable.
But McVey ruled this week that a dismissal of the case was not the appropriate action, noting that one of the biggest errors — the measurement mistake, in which the officer who measured the home recorded inches as feet, resulting in diagrams that made the Truman home appear larger than it was — had already been remedied through granting a new trial.
"There is evidence of ineptitude on the house diagram, advocacy, expert witness preparation and inferential commentary by the prosecution and police," the judge wrote in his ruling. "But nothing constituting deliberate deceitful statements or behavior. If the defendant is exonerated, he will have administrative and civil remedies, rather than a remedy dismissal of this matter."
In court papers, Deputy Utah County Attorney Tim Taylor asserted that prosecutors did not know about the measurement error until well after the trial, and did not knowingly present false evidence. He pointed to the judge's findings in ordering a new trial, in which the court wrote that "neither counsel for the defense [nor] the prosecution could have reasonably known about the [measurement] error."
Conrad Truman's attorney argued at trial that Heidy Truman shot herself, perhaps accidentally.
Where Heidy Truman was inside their home when she was shot, and how far she could have traveled after she was wounded before collapsing near a stairwell, were contentious points at trial.
The incorrect measurements, Moffat has argued, could have led jurors to discredit Conrad Truman's testimony that his wife was shot in the hallway, because they would have shown that his wife had to travel down a hallway that was 2 feet longer than it actually was before falling. During the trial, a medical examiner testified that the woman could have traveled only about a foot or a foot-and-a-half after suffering a gunshot wound to the head.
In his ruling granting a new trial, McVey wrote that because the police officer who measured the home recorded inches as feet, a hallway measurement of 139 inches became 13.9 feet — instead of just over 11.5 feet.