Did Alaska convict an innocent man of murder? Gregory Marino was convicted for a 1993 murder and attempted murder he swears he didn’t commit. Now, the Alaska Innocence Project is using current technology to take another crack at finding the truth.

“He tried to cut off my head,” the seven-year-old little girl said of her attacker.

The intruder had stabbed her in the throat, missing her carotid artery by just a millimeter. She had ten knife wounds, on her hands, chest and feet as well as her throat, where one thrust of the knife had entered below her jaw and sliced upward into a tonsil.

Her cousin, Donna Jackson, was lying dead in a pool of blood inside the front door of their apartment.

That was in 1993.

Gregory Marino, now 58 years old and an inmate at the Red Rock Correctional Facility in Eloy, Arizona, stands convicted of first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder for the events of that night.

Marino was a JC Penney stock clerk and admitted crackhead at the time of the killing, in October of 1993. But he maintained his innocence from the moment police first contacted him, just hours after the brutal slaying of Donna Jane Jackson, 29, and the near-execution of Jackson’s seven-year-old niece Lien Chau Nguyen.

Jackson suffered approximately 62 knife wounds, to the heart, both lungs, the spleen, and her liver, as well as being brutalized with an upright vacuum cleaner. Lien Chau survived, despite her injuries, which required surgery then sedation in the hospital for a couple of days.

No forensic evidence connected Marino to the crime. But according to trial and appeal transcripts and an interview between the police and Marino shortly after the murder he had been smoking crack earlier in the evening with Lien Chau’s older sister (Marino’s 17-year-old girlfriend Lien Thuong Nguyen), at the apartment in Mountain View where the killing occurred.

Marino, a black man, was convicted on the eyewitness testimony of seven-year-old Lien Chau, who had met Marino only once, at his apartment, on her birthday, two weeks prior to the killing.

Since its inception in 1992, the Innocence Project has used DNA testing to exonerate 244 wrongfully convicted people. Earlier this year, when the Alaska Innocence Project—an independent offshoot of the national organization—filed its first-ever claim for post-conviction relief, it did so on Marino’s behalf. The State of Alaska’s Department of Law has agreed to retest palm and fingerprints at the scene, as well as make evidence available for DNA testing (at the Alaska Innocence Project’s expense) should the prints not be sufficient to determine another person’s guilt.

Gregory Marino was no saint. He was convicted of armed robbery in New Orleans in 1973. He was convicted of misdemeanor assault in Anchorage in 1992.

His relationship with Lien Thuong, the seven-year-old’s older sister, revolved around their crack habit. (During Marino’s trial, Lien Thuong admitted she had lied about her age to Marino, telling him she was 23.) On October 22, 1993, according to court documents, Marino brought some crack over to the Nguyens' apartment to smoke with Lien Thuong and a friend named Michelle Pungowiai. Because Donna Jackson and Lien Chau were in the living room, and Lien Thuong didn’t want them to know Marino was over to smoke crack, he entered the house through a bedroom window at around 8 p.m.

The three smoked the rock and called a drug dealer for more; the drugs were delivered and Marino, Lien Thuong, and Pungowiai smoked that as well. Marino left the apartment between 9:30 and 10 p.m., but called Lien Thuong shortly afterward about getting more crack. Not long after that, while Donna Jackson and Lien Chau were still watching TV in the living room, Lien Thuong and Pungowiai left the apartment. Lien Thuong later testified that she and five other people then cruised from cheap hotels to drug dealers’ apartments, purchasing and using crack as fast as they could get it.

Lien Thuong and Pungowiai both said at the trial that Marino had been pissed off about some diamond rings that he’d had Lien Thuong pawn weeks earlier to buy crack. Marino wanted the rings back, and Nguyen testified that he had threatened to hurt her or someone close to her if he didn’t have the rings back by the weekend. Lien Thuong also said that Marino had described to her what a rush it was to kill someone, similar to taking drugs.

Jackson, Lien Thuong’s cousin, and Lien Chau, Lien Thuong’s sister, certainly met the criteria of being people close to Lien Thuong. In an interesting twist, according to court documents, the day before the murder, Jackson was stabbed by someone else, but refused to cooperate with police, telling them only that three men she didn’t know attacked her.

Shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday, October 22, about an hour after Marino admitted to leaving the Nguyen’s home, seven-year-old Lien Chau was woken by the screams of her cousin Donna Jackson calling for help. Lien Chau left her bedroom and saw an intruder attacking Jackson. When the man saw the little girl, he began choking her; with Jackson’s aid, she escaped his grip and ran into her mom’s bedroom; finding no one there she went to her own room and hid under the bed. But she heard the man looking for her. The intruder checked Lien Chau’s mother’s room, then entered her room, first shaking the bed before finding the little girl hiding beneath it.

He demanded to know where Lien Thuong, Lien Chau’s sister, was at, promising not to hurt her if she told him. Lien Chau said she didn’t know. The man then stabbed her in the throat and chest. She blocked her neck with her hands, and pretended to be dead, after which the man stopped stabbing her and exited through the apartment window.

Lien Chau went back to the living room and found her cousin lying dead amid a deluge of blood. She tried to leave the apartment, but her hands were too slippery with blood to turn the doorknob. She went to the kitchen, washed her hands, and called 911 at 11:20 p.m., telling the operator that a black man had beaten and killed her cousin Donna, that she too had been stabbed, and that the man left through the window. A paramedic listening in to the 911 call asked her who had stabbed her, and Lien Chau replied that it was her sister’s friend, who lived near Tommy’s, a grocery store in Mountain View.

Police and paramedics arrived 11 minutes later and encountered a gruesome scene: Jackson’s body lay just in front of the door; furniture was overturned; blood was splattered all over the walls and the floor around Jackson’s body was soaked with blood. In the little girl’s bedroom there was blood on the curtains, the bed, the chest of drawers, and the windowsill through which the attacker had escaped. Three bloody knives, two with hair on them, one bent, were found in the apartment, as well as an upright vacuum cleaner with the handle broken off; besides the 62 stab wounds, Jackson had a head injury most likely caused by the vacuum handle, which had a bloody palm print on it.

Before Lien Chau underwent surgery, she told a police officer that her assailant had been wearing a dark cloth jacket, rubber boots, and a black hat with a white “A” on it. She also said he had curly hair and a mustache, and that he lived in a peach colored apartment near Tommy’s Grocery.

The cops found the building and set up surveillance about 2 a.m., just under three hours after the murder, and after speaking to the apartment manager and determining there was only one resident who matched the description, they saw Marino walking back to the apartment building.

The officers knocked on Marino’s door and he answered. Marino had been scoring crack for a neighbor, who’d given him a bit for his services, which he’d apparently smoked before the cops knocked on his door. “Neither this lieutenant nor I give a fuck whether you get high or not at the moment, y’know what I mean?” the interview transcript reads. “That’s not why we’re here, okay? We’re here for serious stuff.”

The officers observed a bit of blood on Marino’s hand; he told them he’d cut himself on glass at work. They asked to take a sample. “Y’know, you’ve got your blood on you there and stuff… where you got cut? And I would just like to get uh, this is what we call swabs… things, okay? Is that alright?” the officer asked. “It’s alright with me,” Marino responded.

Marino also consented to have the cops take his fingerprints, take blood and urine samples, and fingerprint scrapings for forensic testing. And he allowed them to search his apartment without a warrant—within three hours of the blood-soaked murder. They found no sharp knives, no rubber boots, no black hat with the letter “A” on it. One jacket at Marino’s apartment had a bit of blood on it, but subsequent testing eliminated Donna Jackson and Lien Chau as sources of the blood.

At the crime scene, the police tested several blood samples using the DNA testing capabilities the state crime lab had at the time. None matched Marino’s. They also found shoe prints. Those didn’t match Marino’s either. The cops obtained seven usable fingerprints at the murder site, as well as two handprints, one in the little girl’s bedroom, one on the vacuum cleaner handle. None matched Marino’s. There was no match between the hair samples found at the crime scene and Marino’s hair, nor were any of the victims’ hairs found at Marino’s apartment.

On October 25, APD Detective Bill Reeder went to the hospital to interview Lien Chau, the seven-year-old. He showed her a photo of Marino’s apartment building, where she’d been once, on October 8. Reeder asked Lien Chau to point out the apartment of the man who attacked her; she identified Marino’s apartment, and her mother and the nurse clapped. Reeder stated that she had “pointed… right to the defendant’s door.” Reeder then showed her six photographs, saying they were “photographs of… some black men,” and saying, “I don’t know if this man[’s] picture is there or not, and I need you to tell me whether you… can recognize a picture, okay?”

Lien Chau told the detective the man in photograph number 3 “looks like it might be him… ‘cause he had hair like this one.” It was Marino’s photograph.

Marino argued that the photo identification was improperly suggestive, and Judge Mark Rowland stated that he agreed, at least when it came to the positive reinforcement by the mother, nurse, and Reeder during the identification procedure.

On the other hand, the photos were lined up in two rows of three pictures, and Marino argued that the man in photo number 5 was looking up and to his left, as if directing his gaze at Marino in photo number 3. The judge found this to be frivolous.

Marino was convicted on August 11, 1994 of first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder, although the prosecution admitted its only direct evidence was Lien Chau’s identification of Marino. There was absolutely no forensic evidence to tie him to the crime. He was sentenced to two 99-year terms in prison, to be served consecutively. A subsequent appeal in 1997 upheld his conviction.

Of 230 people exonerated by DNA testing, 75 percent of those wrongful convictions involved eyewitness misidentification, according to research by the national Innocence Project. In 50 percent of those wrongful convictions based on misidentification, the misidentification was the central evidence used against the defendant, without other corroborating evidence like confessions or forensic science, the research says.

In the years since Marino’s conviction, lineup procedures have undergone reforms embraced by the National Institute of Justice and the American Bar Association. Two stand out in light of the Marino case: double-blind presentation, in which the administrator presenting the photo lineup doesn’t know who the suspect is; and lineup members being presented one-by-one rather than side-by-side. (According to Lieutenant Dave Parker of Anchorage Police Department, the APD doesn’t currently use the double-blind method, although lineups are audio recorded.)

Alaska is one of three states in the U.S. that doesn’t have a DNA access law, along with Massachusetts and Oklahoma. Representative Bob Lynn (R-Anchorage) has a bill currently in the legislature that would allow for post-conviction DNA testing, if the applicant can show that the results could establish a reasonable doubt as to the applicant’s guilt of the crime he or she was convicted of.

Senator Hollis French (D-Anchorage) has a related bill that would enforce preservation of evidence, particularly biological evidence that would need to be kept in sufficient quantities and proper conditions to allow future DNA testing. According to French’s office, the bill is supported by the Departments of Law and Public Safety, the Alaska Association of Chiefs of Police, and the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. It’s expected the bill will pass in the upcoming legislative session.

Alaska didn’t have its own Innocence Project chapter until 2006. Before then, individuals who believed they were wrongfully convicted in Alaska could take their case to the Innocence Project Northwest Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law. But the Northwest organization’s workload became so full that it could no longer consider requests from Alaska. So in 2006, the Alaska Innocence Project was incorporated as a nonprofit. In 2007, Bill Oberly was appointed executive director by the 13-member board (Oberly, an attorney, is also the Alaska Innocence Project’s only full-time staffer).

“AIP was begun by a group of dedicated individuals; public defenders and investigators mostly, who were very concerned that Alaska prisoners had no one to hear their claims of innocence,” Oberly says. “All of the board members had full time jobs, however, and it took the generous contribution of one board member to fund the initial salary of an executive director to get the project up and moving forward. We are certainly the smallest Innocence Project in the country, but not the least active. It is truly a labor of dedication from all involved.”

When Oberly started, he had about 30 requests from individuals who claimed to have been wrongfully convicted. The cases already at the Alaska Innocence Project had undergone initial screenings by panels set up within its board of directors, and they’d made recommendations about how to proceed—whether more investigation was required, the case didn’t meet their criteria, etc.

Gregory Marino’s case fell into the “more investigation needed” category.

Yet Marino’s case also stood out from the rest. “It was the most solid of the 30,” Oberly says. There was what Oberly describes as “critical mass” in Marino’s case: Marino’s appellate attorney was convinced he was innocent; Marino had maintained his innocence throughout the years; the eyewitness testimony of a little girl was the only evidence against him; Marino had immediately consented to have his apartment searched within three hours of the murder, and voluntarily gave his fingerprints, blood and urine to the police. In the police interview, the evening of the murder, Marino asks the officers to expedite the process because he has to work at 9 in the morning.

Marino had appealed to three successive governors of the State of Alaska for executive clemency, asking them to look into his case. He’d sought the assistance of the United States Attorney General and the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, asking for help obtaining a review of the evidence in his case.

In December of 2007 Oberly wrote to the Public Defender’s Office and the Office of Public Advocacy, asking for their files in the Marino case; he received seven boxes from the O.P.A. By July of 2008, Oberly had enough information that he asked the District Attorney’s office, APD and the state crime lab to preserve all evidence in the Marino case.

On April 20 of this year, the Alaska Innocence Project filed its first court case in its short history—to establish Marino’s innocence. As a result of the filing, the State of Alaska has agreed to make the evidence from the case available for testing, in two stages. Initially, the state crime lab will test the palm prints from the vacuum cleaner handle and the little girl’s bedroom, as well as all of the fingerprints from the scene. There was no palm print database at the time of Marino’s case; it was determined that the palm print on the vacuum handle was not Marino’s, but before burial, police didn’t take a print from Jackson, the victim. Her body was later exhumed, but decomposition prevented police from getting her palm print.

Even now, the palm print database is fairly small. There are two databases, according to Oberly, one kept by APD and one by the crime lab, with between 6,000 and 8,000 palm prints.

If Marino is indeed innocent, his best-case scenario is that the palm prints will match someone already incarcerated for another crime, and that person will confess to the crime. But even Oberly admits that’s a long shot.

If nothing conclusive comes of the palm and fingerprint testing, the Alaska Innocence Project will, at its own expense, test the DNA archived from the scene to try to determine if it belongs to someone other than Marino or the victims. “At least initially we would be looking toward ‘touch’ or ‘slough off’ DNA like was used in the JonBenet Ramsey case,” Oberly says. “When a person handles an item, skin cells slough off. These contain DNA. The murder weapons are a likely source of such evidence.”

Sometime before Christmas, Marino will be moved to the Hudson Correctional Facility in Hudson, Colorado, since the State of Alaska ended its contract to house prisoners at Red Rock in Arizona. Oberly is still waiting to hear from the Department of Law about when the initial print testing will be conducted at the state crime lab. (As reported previously in the Press, the crime lab has an extensive backlog of pending cases, and is desperately in need of expansion.)

If Marino didn’t kill Jackson, someone else did.

And if the Innocence Project successfully identifies another person, either by retesting the prints or subsequent DNA testing, they’ll have succeeded not only in freeing an innocent man, but in catching a murderer too. And perhaps more importantly to those of us who don’t have a personal stake in the Marino case, they’ll have succeeded in holding the judicial system accountable, a system we all rely upon to work correctly.

bjk@anchoragepress.com