By Marcus K. Garner
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATLANTA — A convicted killer could go free 27 years after admitting to murder, due to a new Georgia Supreme Court ruling.
Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr. said he plans to challenge the decision or to at least to assure that Curtis Tyner remains in a state prison for killing Martha Anne Mickel in April 1984.
“There is no debate with respect to who suffers most from this decision — the family members of Martha Anne Mickel who thought that this matter was concluded 27 years ago with a guilty plea,” Howard said.
Mickel’s brother, Joe Mickel, also an attorney, struggled Monday to pay respect to the prosecution and the judge who first heard Tyner’s plea years ago, as well as to the state Supreme Court. Still, Mickel’s response was curt: “It’s appalling.”
The opinion, written by Justice David Nahmias, determined that no one fully informed Tyner, then 36, of all the rights he waived when he originally made his guilty plea.
“The record does not show that Tyner was advised of his right against self-incrimination,” Nahmias wrote in the opinion filed Monday morning. “His guilty plea was invalid and we must reverse his conviction.”
But Harvey Moskowitz, the Fulton County assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case at the time, argued that he, Judge Isaac Jenrette and public defender Carl Greenberg did everything according to the letter of the law.
“Greenberg, myself and the judge advised him of his rights as we knew them at the time,” Moskowitz told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I don’t see why this was overturned.”
Martha Mickel, then a 30-year-old executive for IBM, didn’t show for a wedding on the weekend of April 15, 1984. And the Smyrna woman wasn’t at church the next day.
Her body was found later that Sunday, floating in Bear Creek in south Fulton County.
Fulton County police followed a lead that she had hired Tyner to paint her townhouse. After he was arrested and charged with Mickel’s death, he confessed to investigators that he had bound Mickel with duct tape and put her in her car.
A medical examiner pointed to ligature markings indicating that she had been tied around the neck to her automobile’s headrest. She has been sexually assaulted. Tyner told police that when she slumped over, he thought she had died. He said he threw her in the river, not knowing she was still breathing.
The medical examiner ruled Mickel’s cause of death as drowning.
“I found it to be unconscionable that he would do that,” said Moskowitz, now retired and serving on the board of the Atlanta Law School Foundation.
But Charles Frier, who appealed the case on Tyner’s behalf, said he was pleased with the outcome.
“I’m delighted that he finally got it overturned and the obvious error was seen,” Frier said.
Copyright 2011 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution