A jury couldn’t reach a verdict in the trial of a man accused of a Thanksgiving Day 2005 killing — an investigation in which, the defense said, D.C. police failed to preserve evidence as required by law.
Makia Mosby, 23, was found shot in the head, her apartment on fire, on Valley Avenue SE.
Nineteen years later, police charged Michael Wells with the crime.
During the trial in June, the jury heard testimony that 911 calls, photographs and other evidence were either lost or destroyed in violation of a law the D.C. Council passed just a year earlier. As the trial got underway, defense attorneys told the jury crucial evidence in the case had been lost. In a motion to dismiss the case, the defense attorneys wrote the loss of evidence “critically prejudiced” Mr. Wells’ ability to present an effective defense. They further wrote, “The evidentiary record of the initial years of this investigation is nearly nonexistent.”
That outcome should have been avoided after the passage of the Millicent Allewelt Act in 2004.
“And what it did was it extended the retention of schedule for homicide files and also evidence, mandating that we maintain custody of this stuff, all of it, not just the investigative files,” retired D.C. police cold case Detective Jim Trainum said. “Not just, you know, the photographs, evidence, everything for a minimum of 65 years.”
But as Wells’ defense attorneys told the jury and was spelled out in a filing, “Because there are more than 100+ photos missing, there are no photographs of several areas of the bedroom, including the locations where evidence was purportedly collected.” The filing goes on to say, “The 911 recordings were never preserved.”
Trainum learned in the early 2000s that critical evidence was missing in an untold number of homicide cases and alerted then D.C. Councilmember Kathy Patterson, who got the Millicent Allewelt Act passed. Trainum said the department was not abiding by the law while he was still on the force.
“The law passed in 2004, and the department didn’t issue any kind of general order, a special order, about the retention schedule until 2006,” he said.
When the jury began deliberations in late June in D.C. Superior Court, it had been given instructions by the judge on the missing evidence. But by July 2, the jury had told the court it was at an impasse and could not reach a verdict. A mistrial was declared.
“We have lost cases and we are going to continue to lose cases if we don’t, you know, follow this procedure,” Trainum said.
The defense attorneys representing Wells did not respond to News4’s request for comment. The Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
The Millicent Allewelt Act is named after a young woman who was raped and murdered in D.C. in the 1970s. Key evidence in that case was lost or destroyed.
