Duval County: The Tributary challenges Kenneth Hartley's conviction (Part 1)
Kenneth Hartley was convicted and sentenced to death in 1993 and remains on Florida’s death row. Today, The Tributary published a three-part story challenging the veracity of Hartley’s conviction.
The following was reprinted with permission from The Tributary, a nonprofit newsroom covering Florida. It is part 1 of a 3-part series. The rest can be found here.
By Nichole Manna/The Tributary
Part I: The Prosecution
Chapter 1: Case Closed
On its surface, the prosecution of Kenneth Hartley was like hundreds of others that unfolded in the Jacksonville courthouse in the 1990s, when the violent deaths of young Black men had become a disturbingly routine occurrence.
No physical evidence tied Hartley to the 1991 kidnapping and murder of Gino Mayhew, a 17-year-old Paxon High senior. Instead, George Bateh, a veteran Jacksonville prosecutor, known for uncompromising courtroom tactics, built the prosecution on the shoulders of a star witness who was eager to peg Hartley as one of the three men responsible.
Bateh was unambiguous about the importance of his key witness: “Until Sidney Jones came forward, this was an unsolved murder,” he said in open court.
Jones accused Hartley and two others of forcing Mayhew into a car at gunpoint in a part of Northwest Jacksonville known for years as a notorious open-air drug bazaar. And Hartley had a reputation for wrongdoing: He was freshly out of prison after serving four years for killing a 15-year-old girl with a shotgun and was accused of armed robbery in another case.
In 1993, a jury convicted Hartley, largely based on Jones’ testimony, and recommended the death sentence in a 9-3 vote. Circuit Judge R. Hudson Olliff commended Bateh, penning a letter to the prosecutor’s boss comparing him to the dogged Inspector Javert from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.
Months later, the judge sent Hartley to Death Row.
Case closed.
But there was something more about Sidney Jones, something problematic, that neither the jurors nor Hartley’s defense team were told: Jones was a fabulist, known for lying on the witness stand in a previous murder case. Evidence surfaced after the trial that Jacksonville detectives who’d once paid him for passing along information from the streets came to deeply distrust him.
One former Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office detective described Jones in writing years later as a “lying piece of shit.”
A seven-month Tributary investigation of Hartley’s case – which included a review of thousands of pages of court records, handwritten detective and prosecutor notes, police reports and interviews with everyone involved who is alive and willing to talk – revealed a prosecution marred by critical omissions about the linchpin state witness and other questionable decisions and practices.
Once authorities zeroed in on Hartley, they pursued him with a zealousness that obscured the weaknesses in their case, which relied on a patchwork of ne’er-do-well jailhouse informants with credibility problems, some of whom have recanted their testimony, according to sworn affidavits, court documents and interviews.
There is a high bar for undoing a 32-year-old conviction, especially when many of the players are dead, and some powerful Florida elected officials and judges believe it should be easier to execute the condemned. The political optics of such cases can be fraught: Death Row inmates sometimes present as unsavory figures with long criminal records, even when defense lawyers believe they've been railroaded.
Hartley’s lawyers, George Kendall and Linda McDermott, are giving it a try despite several past unsuccessful appeals. Should they succeed, it could also unravel the convictions of Hartley’s two co-defendants, who were tried separately but largely on the same evidence. It could also sully the reputation of a respected retired prosecutor and raise questions about the ethics of the office he served.
For Hartley, the path ahead offers reasons for hope and despair: Some of the evidence that undermines his three-decade-old prosecution came from State Attorney Melissa Nelson’s Conviction Integrity Review Division, the first of its kind in Florida to review past convictions for potential errors and reverse them when warranted.
The State Attorney’s Office said the integrity unit never undertook a review of Hartley’s case, but Shelley Thibodeau, the unit’s director, has told others that she has “concerns” about the prosecution against one of Hartley’s co-defendants, Ronnie Ferrell. There is significant overlap between the evidence used to convict both Ferrell and Hartley – an overlap Hartley’s defense attorneys have emphasized in court filings.
Chapter 2: Sherwood Forest
Just before the first school bell rang on Tuesday, April 23, 1991, cafeteria worker Vivian Robinson noticed something out of place: an SUV-sized hole cut in the fence surrounding Sherwood Forest Sixth Grade Center. A bronze Chevy Blazer was parked on a grassy patch by the basketball court, inside the fence.
Peering through the SUV’s window in the rain, Robinson saw someone slumped across the front seat, facedown.
Gino Mayhew lay dead from multiple gunshot wounds.
William Bolena, a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office homicide detective with one year in the role, was summoned to the scene as well as prosecutor George Bateh. As Bolena surveyed the vehicle, Mayhew’s relatives approached him with a story:
Mayhew’s distant cousin, Sylvester “Duck” Johnson, robbed Mayhew and shot at him two days earlier. Johnson, they said, robbed people all the time. He had also been involved in two prior murder cases. Maybe Duck killed him.
A sawed-off shotgun was found on the back floorboard of Mayhew’s Blazer, and small clear bags commonly used to package drugs were on the driver’s seat.
Mayhew had three bullet holes in the back of his head, one on his shoulder and another through his right index finger, as if he’d raised his hand to protect himself.
.25-caliber casings were wedged between the driver-side door and front seat.
One set of fingerprints not belonging to Mayhew – nor, as it later turned out, to Hartley – was lifted from the SUV. To whom those prints belong remains a mystery today.
Bolena wrote himself a note about Johnson.
Chapter 3: A drug mart off Moncrief
Gino Mayhew’s death made him a statistic and a rallying cry.
He was remembered as popular but quiet, a young man who favored suits and gold jewelry at school. His murder came amid a spate of killings of Black youth – 16 in 1991 alone. That sparked an outcry that violent crimes in the Black community received less attention and yielded milder punishment than those in which the victim was white.
All this ratcheted up pressure on authorities to solve Mayhew’s murder and make his killer pay.
The morning after Mayhew’s body was found, detectives got their second lead. A relative of Mayhew called Bolena to report that Ronnie “Fish” Ferrell, a close friend of the deceased, had been with him around 9 the night of the killing. Ferrell called investigators a day or two later to ask if there was an update on the case. He was invited in for an interview on April 26, 1991.
Ferrell confirmed he saw Mayhew that night outside the Washington Heights apartment complex off Moncrief Road, where drug dealers conducted a brisk business. Ferrell claimed to have left around 9:30 – hours before the crime – to stay at his mother-in-law’s.
He told detectives that Mayhew was indeed beaten and robbed two days before his body was discovered and that his friend was bent on revenge, apparently against Johnson. Ferrell said he urged Mayhew not to retaliate.
Then, the investigation seemingly went stale for about two weeks. At some point, Bateh wrote an undated note that he needed to talk to Mayhew’s family about the “weak case.”
Detectives re-interviewed Ferrell on May 7, 1991, prompted by multiple people telling police they saw him at the apartment complex after 9:30 the night of the murder. Ferrell said they were lying and grew progressively louder during the interview, police wrote.
Ferrell joined Johnson on the suspect list.
During that second interview, Bolena asked Ferrell if he knew Kenneth “Kip” Hartley. Hartley’s name had come up as someone who hung out with Johnson, according to the detective’s notes.
Ferrell responded that Hartley was a “bad dude.”
Eleven hours after that interview, Bolena wrote he got a call from Sidney Jones, a lifelong criminal who worked for police as a paid confidential informant. According to Bolena, Jones recounted seeing Hartley, Ferrell and Johnson on the night of the murder at Washington Heights. Hartley held a gun to Mayhew’s head, he claimed.
Detectives arrested 24-year-old Hartley on May 16, 1991. It was 94 days after he won early release from a sentence for manslaughter for what he said was the accidental shotgun death of a teenage girl, Angel McCormick.
Ferrell, 27, was taken into custody that same day. The arrest of Johnson, 23, followed 13 days later.
The arrest of Johnson, 23, followed 13 days later.
All three men denied having any involvement in Mayhew’s killing.
Chapter 4: Felon, liar, witness
Sidney Jones, one of 16 siblings, was no one’s idea of an ideal witness. He picked up pocket money from Jacksonville detectives by snitching on drug dealers as he purchased and consumed the dealers’ wares. At the trial, he testified he was a six-time felon, which Hartley’s appellate lawyers say was a lie and that the real number was nine felonies, plus four misdemeanors.
But, unknown to the jury and Hartley’s attorney at the time, Jones’ biggest problem was a prior perjury.
In March 1979, when Jones was 19 and, according to a local attorney, already a paid informant for JSO, he testified as a witness in a Duval County robbery-turned-homicide trial
But during a court recess, attorneys for the defendants discovered Jones’s story was made up. He’d been in jail when the events he described occurred. Jones got three years in prison for perjury. But the Florida Supreme Court overturned the conviction a decade later, faulting the judge for not letting him return to the stand to recant.
Robert Willis, Hartley’s attorney, had asked Bateh whether any of the state’s witnesses had a history of perjury. Bateh, whose office handled the perjury case, said he didn’t know – and that Willis could find out for himself.
Willis could have used Jones’ past perjury to cripple his credibility.
There was yet another problem with Sidney Jones: After years of service, he’d been labeled a dishonest snitch by detectives and kicked out of the confidential informant corps. Jones had been an informant for the department since the 1970s, Rick Sichta, who successfully fought to get Ferrell’s initial death sentence changed to life, told The Tributary.
“The only job that Sidney Jones had for his entire adult life was ratting people out,” Sichta said. “He was paid money every time he would help the police, so he was literally financially backed by the police department.”
A confidential-informant payment voucher from the week before Mayhew’s murder has the word “blackballed” scrawled across it with a marker pen. There is no further explanation, including when it was written, and it isn’t clear exactly when Jones was cut from working with the department or why.
Seventeen years later, a retired JSO detective who had assisted with the Hartley investigation would email that Jones was a “lying piece of shit.”
The former cop, John Zipperer, had become a private investigator and was now working for Ronnie Ferrell’s team of appellate attorneys. In the email, he noted that no one would admit to why Jones was blackballed.
When Hartley’s case went to trial, the jury was unaware of Jones’ past perjury or apparent history of dishonesty as a police informant. Jones gave his account of the night’s events, which went as follows:
Jones was in the “first lane” of the Washington Heights parking lot helping his “very good friend” Mayhew sell crack by redirecting customers from competing dealers. Mayhew, he told potential customers, had “better rocks.”
Under oath, he described seeing a conspiratorial “huddle” that involved Sylvester Johnson, Ronnie Ferrell and Kenneth Hartley, after which Hartley approached Mayhew’s Blazer, a gun in his bare right hand. He pointed it at Mayhew’s head. Jones said Hartley then climbed into the rear seat and Ferrell slid into the front next to Mayhew, who was behind the wheel. With Hartley’s gun trained to the back of his skull, Mayhew sped away, whump-whumping over two speed bumps and running a red light before turning left onto Moncrief Road, a route that would take him to Sherwood Forest school.
A purple truck followed, with Johnson driving, according to Jones.
All this was witnessed not just by him, Jones said, but by others in the crowd of crack dealers, buyers, and bystanders.
Jones said he figured his friend was going to be murdered.
He had the means to possibly prevent that – the beeper number of his JSO handler. But he didn’t call. He testified he was “very, very scared” and had been warned not to bother the detective outside of business hours.
Instead of summoning help, he walked down Moncrief to his home, where he boiled some sausage, drank a Coke, watched TV and fired up his crack pipe before going to bed.
The next day, he said, “TV woke me up with my friend Gino on the news.”
Still, he did not get in touch with his police contact.
He said he summoned the courage to call the cops only after landing in jail on a trespassing charge. Jones would later explain that “I felt more secure and felt more protected in being in jail than I did on the street.”
Hartley’s attorneys, however, say they can produce evidence he was, in fact, not in jail the day he called police.
Chapter 5: Alleged coercion
Although Bateh’s case notes said he looked for credible corroborating witnesses from the apartment complex, where Jones said Hartley helped kidnap his victim amid the bustling drug market, he apparently found none – or if he did, he did not choose to put them on the witness stand.
He did, however, produce the next best thing at trial: a witness whose first-hand account picked up where Jones’ left off. It was another man who, according to Hartley’s appellate attorneys, was a confidential informant: Juan Brown.
Brown, a 29-year-old window tinter with a long arrest record, told the jury he was one of three occupants of a Burgundy Catalina heading north on Moncrief at about 11:30 p.m. when he said he spied his friend Mayhew’s Blazer approaching from the opposite direction.
Though both cars passed each other at rapid speed in the dark, heading in opposite directions, Brown testified he was able to spot Ronnie Ferrell in the front passenger seat and a light-skinned Black male with a build similar to Hartley’s “crouched” behind Mayhew.
Police never asked Brown for help in locating the other two occupants of the Catalina, he told the jury.
Dr. Brian Cahill, a University of Florida expert on eyewitness testimony, was hired by Hartley’s appellate lawyers to analyze Brown’s story. Cahill did a reconstruction of the event. He said under conditions similar to those described by Brown, it was impossible to identify the type of vehicle approaching in the dark, much less any physical characteristics of its occupants. How could Brown testify he knew that person was Ronnie Ferrell?
The state attorney’s investigators re-examining the case spoke with Brown in January 2024 and at first he recalled being on foot – not in a vehicle – when he saw Mayhew drive toward Sherwood Forest. When he was confronted about the difference, he changed his story, saying he’d been in a vehicle, but that he was alone.
Although the jury wasn’t made aware, Brown and Mayhew had a connection through Brown’s girlfriend. According to appellate attorneys, Mayhew did not live in Washington Heights, but Brown’s girlfriend did, and Mayhew used her apartment as a base of operations for his drug dealing.
Records show that on May 2, 1991, two weeks after the murder, an undercover operative purchased a rock of cocaine for $20 from the girlfriend at that apartment.
Recently, Brown’s half-brother, Roland Redmond, tied the events together for Hartley’s legal team. He said Brown told him JSO arrested his girlfriend to get at him.
In his sworn statement, Redmond said, “Juan told me that JSO arrested [his girlfriend] on a drug sale charge to force him to cooperate in the Mayhew case. The threat was that if Juan didn’t testify the way they wanted him to, [the girlfriend] was going to go to prison and lose her children.”
“Juan told me his testimony was coerced. He had seen nothing at all.”
On June 5, 1991, the same day formal charges – signed by Bateh because he was the head of the felony division – were filed against Brown’s girlfriend, Brown went on record with police, writing in longhand what he said he had seen. Curiously, that statement didn’t name Ferrell as the man in the front passenger seat. Detective Bolena’s police report dated three weeks later says Brown did name Ferrell.
A month after the prosecution secured Brown’s cooperation, his girlfriend’s cocaine-selling charge was dropped. She was given community service for a second count of possession.
Redmond said the girlfriend’s legal troubles went away “based on Juan’s cooperation.”
The Tributary was unable to contact Juan Brown.
Chapter 6: Jabo, Tank and Snake
Ronald Bronner knew how to play the game.
On multiple occasions, Bronner, known as “Jabo,” had worked as a jailhouse informant – “snitch” in prison parlance.
One defendant he snitched on confronted him after getting out of prison. Foster Lee Brown said in a sworn affidavit years later that a contrite Bronner gave him $5,000 as “an apology and peace offering.”
For a willing informant like Bronner, whose frequent misdeeds were easy leverage for prosecutors, the early ’90s were a fruitful time.
Enter Bronner and Eric “Tank” Brooks. Both were arrested in the summer of 1991 and placed in the Duval County jail with Hartley and his co-defendants. Records show both were assigned as Hartley’s cellmates in hopes they might deliver a confession – which they did, as did a third man, Anthony “Snake” Parkin.
At Hartley’s trial, Bronner testified: “Well, I asked Hartley how he got involved in the murder of Gino Mayhew. He said the plan was Sylvester Johnson’s. He said the initial idea was to rob some “dreads,” which he explained meant Jamaican drug dealers, but there were none to be targeted that night.
Instead, Johnson said: “Let’s get Gino.”
According to Bronner, Hartley said that after abducting Mayhew, making him drive to the school campus and robbing him of his money and drugs he “left my trademark,” meaning killed him so there would be no witness
Brooks and Bronner insisted they were not working as a team, that they had talked to Hartley on separate occasions. But what they described as Hartley’s cruel demeanor matched almost word for word.
Bronner: “He was bragging. He was going to get off. He said everyone was scared of him.”
Brooks: “[He was] bragging, you know, like he was going to get away with the whole thing because the police didn’t have a case against him because the witnesses were afraid.”
Parkin, in turn, said he heard Hartley confess his crime twice, once when Parkin eavesdropped on a conversation from outside Hartley’s cell, a second time when he and Hartley shared a smoke in Parkin’s cell.
Bronner, Brooks and Parkin each used the same description of Hartley: “cold-blooded.” That, said Sichta, Ferrell’s appellate attorney, is both striking and “no coincidence at all.”
“There's no way they weren't fed this information because it's so similar and it's so calculated,” he told The Tributary. “Cold-blooded? That's not how people talk.”
All this testimony served to corroborate Jones – and Bateh would use the term “cold-blooded” to argue that Hartley deserved death.
The men denied they were made any promises by the prosecution other than that they wouldn’t be sentenced as habitual offenders, a designation that could double the length of a sentence. But they still faced between 15 and 30 years, the men told jurors.
Chapter 7: Prosecutor George Bateh
After two days of trial testimony, on Aug. 27, 1993, George Bateh stood before jurors and shined the best possible light on the prosecution's case. With a blown-up photo of Mayhew’s body as a backdrop, Bateh told jurors it didn’t matter that Hartley’s fingerprints weren’t on the truck, given any number of other factors, including that he had confessed in jail. He told jurors they might not want Sidney Jones as a neighbor, but they should believe his story.
“He was the only person out at Washington Heights that had the courage to come forward. He broke through that wall of silence that exists out there,” Bateh said.
And, he said, they should believe the informants, who testified they were motivated not by sentencing deals, but by the desire to see justice done. He told jurors that the informants, in their testimony, filled in details of the crime – such as the murder weapon’s caliber, which had not been disclosed publicly – that they could only have gotten from Mayhew’s killer.
“Those are indications of truth,” Bateh said.
And then he explained why there were no other willing witnesses from the apartment complex that night.
“F-E-A-R, fear is a major factor in this murder,” Bateh said. “It’s a fact of life, fear is as much a witness in this case as the witnesses that walked through that door, walked up here, sat on that chair and talked to you with their mouths.”
Bob Willis, Hartley’s attorney, didn’t present any witnesses, though transcripts and records show he attempted to introduce evidence of an alternate suspect. That would-be suspect purportedly told a friend while both were in jail that he had shot Mayhew, pushed his body over and drove to the school, then wiped down his fingerprints.
In a pre-trial hearing, that suspect denied admitting to the murder. The judge ruled it was all inadmissible hearsay. The gap in the fence never came up at trial.
The alternate suspect spent time in a Florida prison himself after Mayhew’s death: four years for robbery with a deadly weapon and, after that, 21 years for assaulting a pregnant woman. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office arrested him once more last year on charges of trafficking drugs while possessing a gun.
Thwarted by the judge’s ruling, Willis could only argue in his closing statement that the state’s investigation was like a train that started on the wrong track and just kept chugging.
By dinnertime that same day, after three hours of deliberation, Hartley was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping and armed robbery.
On Sept. 7, 1993, with the case still pending on his calendar, Judge Olliff penned a letter to State Attorney Harry Shorstein hailing Bateh’s “unparalleled accomplishment.”
“George’s dogged determination and devotion to duty is reminiscent of Inspector Javert's relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables,” the former prosecutor-turned-judge wrote. “George is devoted and committed and fair in the prosecution of criminals but uncompromising in his principles. With it all, he is a gentleman and a credit to himself and to your office.”
Judge Olliff’s affinity for prosecutors was no secret, according to Frank Tassone, a former prosecutor in the same office as Bateh. Bill White, Jacksonville’s former elected public defender, told the Times-Union in 2015 that Olliff would offer tips to assistant state attorneys who appeared in his courtroom.
“He'd often call up prosecutors and give them notes about how they should try their cases,” White said. “I once asked him, ‘Where are your notes for me?’”
Two days after Olliff authored the letter of praise, Bateh was back in his courtroom for Hartley’s punishment phase of the trial.
Harkening back to the informants’ testimony, Bateh said Hartley killed in “cold-blooded”, merciless fashion.
“I would submit to you that he places no value on human life or very little value. This is an aggravating circumstance that applies in this case,” Bateh said. “It is a demanding aggravating circumstance and it justifies a recommendation of death.”
The jury concurred, voting 9-3 for the death penalty.
Two months later, it was Judge Olliff’s turn. In his newspaper obituary years later, he would be referred to in the headline as the “hanging judge” because of his penchant for doling out death sentences, even when juries recommended mercy, which this jury hadn’t.
“This is another of many violent criminals given an early prison release and thereafter committed more violent crimes, all to the great danger of the people of Florida and especially to the danger of Gino Mayhew,” Olliff said.
Hartley was going to Death Row.
As for the three jailhouse informants – who told jurors they faced between 15 and 30 years – they would soon go home. None saw the inside of a Florida prison cell.
Chapter 8: A case of conscience
Nearly three decades later, on April 8, 2022, Bronner, who’d parlayed his testimony against Hartley into a get-out-of-jail-free card, called his former attorney, Nah-Deh Simmons, to cleanse his conscience, according to an affidavit signed by the lawyer.
Simmons said Bronner made clear that “his statements to law enforcement and testimony against Hartley [were] false. Hartley never admitted to killing or being involved in the murder of Gino Mayhew.”
Simmons’ statement about Bronner, however, could prove to have limited use for Hartley: Simmons was arrested the following year for conspiracy to commit perjury and solicitation to commit perjury in an unrelated case.
But Simmons wasn’t the only one to hear from Bronner about his past life: About five months later, Bronner allegedly confessed again to giving false testimony against Hartley, this time to a friend, Leroy Tillie, as they dined at Golden Corral.
Tillie told investigators for Hartley: “Jabo knew that he had an eager prosecutor who only cared about getting convictions. Though he had ‘jumped on’ [been an informant on] many cases over the years, he always regretted jumping on Kip’s the most. He remarked that Kip had received a death sentence.”
In October 2022, before Hartley’s and Ferrell’s lawyers could interview him, Bronner died. But his alleged admission to Nah-Deh Simmons spurred appellate attorneys for Ferrell to hire an investigator to talk to Bronner and Brooks’ cellmates from 1991-1993.
Several provided sworn statements. They said Bronner and Brooks, rather than operating separately, schemed together to make up confessions and get as many detainees as possible to back up their story. And that they were given case file material by authorities to help in their efforts:
Dwayne Hagans: “I overheard Ronald Bronner say that he was just trying to get out of jail and was willing to give the state anything they wanted against Kenneth Hartley. Hartley never confessed to him but Ronald Bronner was still willing to point the finger . . . .”
Larry Wynn: “Jabo [Bronner] offered to provide me the information I would need [to testify]. He stated that the [State Attorney’s Office] was always open for business. Jabo was trying to get more witnesses for the state on the case. . . . Jabo had no concerns about falsely testifying about Hartley or anyone else for that matter.”
Earl Peeples: “They said George Bateh offered them a deal in their own case in exchange for their testimony against Kenneth Hartley. I saw Ronald Bronner and Eric Brooks with Kenneth Hartley’s legal paperwork. I also heard Ronald Bronner and Eric Brooks trying to recruit others to testify . . . .”
Another would-be witness remembered how Detective John Zipperer, the cop who years later labeled Sidney Jones a “lying piece of shit,” would come calling at the jail with coffee and donuts. He met individually with detainees to explain exactly what prosecutors required, said Derrick Shiloh. “He told me all I needed to say was that Hartley confessed to me.”
Like Bronner, Anthony Parkin also recently recanted, according to a 460-page court filing that is an encyclopedia of evidence in support of having a full-scale evidentiary hearing. In the wake of that claim about Parkin, Florida’s attorney general ordered that the former informant, who allegedly recanted to an investigator working for Hartley, be provided a lawyer to represent him in the event he is charged with perjury for changing his story.
Tyler Gates, vice president of the Northeast Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the state is ethically obligated to tell someone who wants to recant testimony that they could be confessing to perjury – which also means they’re entitled to an attorney. However, he said the act could also be seen as a way to intimidate the witness into keeping quiet.
Brooks died in 2020, magnifying Parkin’s importance as the only living jailhouse informant from Hartley’s trial.
Chapter 9: What happens next
Kenneth Hartley – who signs his mail from Raiford “an innocent man” – has lived on Florida’s Death Row for three decades. He has watched 73 men walk to the execution chamber while his own appeals got rejected over and over.
Then, in 2023, the state attorney’s Conviction Integrity Review Division contacted Hartley’s federal public defenders to alert them to evidence uncovered while they investigated the case of Hartley’s co-defendant, Ferrell.
The integrity division is not universally supported by some veterans of the office, some of whom have publicly criticized the unit’s past work.
Nelson has declined to comment on Ferrell or Hartley. Hartley’s attorneys believe there are more records in the state’s possession that could help establish Hartley’s innocence and have fought for months to get them released.
The evidentiary hearing, should it occur, will be before Judge London Kite, who is presiding over the current appeal. At that time, appellate lawyers could attempt to get Parkin under oath about what they believe is his made-up testimony. And they could argue that Bateh, who put 15 defendants on Death Row in a long career, knew that jurors were being misled about both Sidney Jones’ perjury case and the rewards in store for the informants for their damning testimony.
Craig Trocino, a University of Miami associate professor who runs the Miami Law Innocence Clinic, said the state’s omissions during the trial are “outrageous.”
“The defense has a right to cross-examine any deal from a prosecutor,” he said of the breaks afforded Parkin, Bronner, and Brooks. Otherwise “it’s essentially a trial by ambush,” he said. “It’s hiding the ball. If your case is strong, then you should be able to get a conviction without those moves.”
Melanie Kalmanson, a Jacksonville attorney who runs the Tracking Florida's Death Penalty blog and has done extensive death penalty-related pro bono, emphasized the complexities involved in cases like Hartley’s, and why it can be so difficult to overturn a death penalty case or get a new trial.
“The longer somebody is on Death Row, the more difficult it is to raise a claim that’s ripe for review,” she said. For one thing, she said, appellate attorneys have to demonstrate that their client did not have and could not have had the new evidence previously.
Chapter 10: Closure
Hartley, who was sent to Death Row on Dec 9, 1993, has had a quiet stay at Raiford, where he and other condemned prisoners wait to be executed. He has just two minor disciplinary marks over three decades.
Ferrell’s death sentence was changed to life in 2010 after successfully arguing that he had ineffective counsel at his original trial. He continues to maintain his innocence and filed a self-styled motion to correct his sentence in January.
The state attorney’s office refused to say what if anything happened with the review of his case by the conviction integrity unit.
Johnson received a life sentence in 1993. He has attempted to represent himself in several appeals since then, none of which were successful.
Two years after the trial, Judge Olliff retired, capping a 24-year judicial career.
His 2015 obit marked the passing of the “hanging judge,” and recounted how his World War II service, including at the Battle of the Bulge, left him with lifelong injuries that necessitated the use of leg braces. And how he favored packing a gun in chambers.
The Florida Times-Union noted that Olliff had put more people on Death Row than any other Jacksonville judge.
Bolena died in 2017. An obituary recounted his JSO career, which spanned 20 years and included time as a homicide detective and patrolman.
Zipperer and Bateh are both long retired from their agencies, though Zipperer worked as a contract investigator for the State Attorney’s Office looking into the controversial attempted sale of JEA, Jacksonville's community-owned utility, in 2019 and continues to labor part-time for the office. Zipperer declined to discuss his involvement in the Hartley case with The Tributary.
The Tributary met with Bateh for about 90 minutes and presented him with the findings of its investigation, but he declined to speak on the record about the prosecution. He said of his career: “I was firm, but I always felt I was fair. I could be aggressive with violent crime but I always felt it was an appropriate balance. I was honest with the court and honest with other counsel. And I preached that [honesty] in the office and told the younger counsel we had to play fair – that the people we were prosecuting were American citizens and they had rights.”
Willis did not wish to talk, concerned he could be a witness at a future hearing.
Parkin, whose nickname is a nod to his affinity for snakes, will bring a colorful resume with him if appellate attorneys succeed in getting him on the witness stand at an evidentiary hearing.
In 1991, Parkin was accused multiple times of trying to escape from the Duval County jail. Since then, he has racked up numerous charges ranging from punching a man at a local restaurant to breaking and entering. In 2003, a news report from Live Oak, Florida, described how a Jacksonville man with the same name got bit by a snake in a Walmart garden center. It was suspected that Parkin had planted the snake himself, a source familiar with him said.
When two journalists from the Tributary approached Parkin at his home in Northwest Jacksonville in December, he ambled out of a dilapidated structure to greet them. He backed away when asked to discuss the case.
Sidney Jones, still residing in Jacksonville, remains a key witness. Under cross-examination at the trial, Jones assured the jury that Mayhew’s murder was a “turning point” in his life.
“I haven’t smoked another rock since Gino Mayhew was dead,” he testified.
A year after the trial, he was charged with burglary and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. For that, he ended up serving 10 years. He has been arrested a dozen other times in Duval County.
As he served his time, he corresponded with Bateh by letter and phone, records show, sometimes asking for help in being reassigned to a new prison. The reasons for other contacts are unclear.
When The Tributary attempted to talk to Jones, he told a reporter he was too busy to chat and hung up. He has ignored texts and calls since.
On June 23, 2023, Daniel J. Ashton, an attorney for the Federal Public Defender’s Office, was present as Jones was interviewed by the state attorney’s conviction integrity unit, as part of its look into Ferrell’s conviction.
In an affidavit he swore out after the conversation with Jones, Ashton wrote that Jones said Mayhew was kidnapped from the stairwell of a building in Washington Heights – not while by his Blazer – and recalled it happened around 1 or 2 a.m., hours later than he originally testified. He still pinned the kidnapping on the same three men, but claimed Johnson – not Ferrell, as he had testified at trial – approached Mayhew for some drugs and that Hartley came back to drag Mayhew out of the stairwell and into the SUV.
The one-time confidential informant revealed why he came forward, and it wasn’t, as Bateh said, necessarily a matter of newfound courage.
Jones thought he was going to be paid.
This is part one of a three-part series – the rets is available here.
This story was reported, written and edited by The Tributary, a non-profit investigative newsroom covering Florida. Senior Investigative Reporter Nichole Manna (nichole.manna@jaxtrib.org) reviewed more than 65,000 pages of court documents – including court transcripts and detective and prosecutor notes – that she obtained through multiple record requests. She spoke to everyone involved in the case who is alive and was willing.