By Randall Chase
Associated Press
DOVER, Del. — A Delaware judge is holding a hearing regarding the custody status of a former death row inmate whose conviction and death sentence were overturned last year.
Wednesday’s scheduled hearing comes four months after the judge granted a request by Isaiah McCoy to be released from solitary confinement and transferred into the general prison population while awaiting a retrial for a 2010 drug-related killing outside a Dover bowling alley.
In a letter sent to Judge Robert Young on Monday, McCoy’s attorney, Herbert Mondros, said the state was retaliating against McCoy for challenging the conditions of his pretrial confinement.
In his August ruling, Young noted that McCoy had spent more than five years in solitary confinement, although during much of that time he was presumed innocent, either awaiting trial or after his conviction was overturned. He also noted that solitary confinement impeded McCoy’s ability to meet with his lawyers.
After Young denied the state’s request to reconsider his ruling, prison officials put McCoy in electronic shackles and transferred him from the maximum-security prison in Smyrna to Howard Young correctional institution in Wilmington, according to Mondros. At Howard Young, McCoy was put in solitary confinement for a 24-hour “suicide watch,” then placed in administrative segregation for 10 days, Mondros wrote.
Mondros said the state has continued to restrict McCoy’s access to the prison law library, and that defense attorneys have not been allowed face-to-face visits with him outside the earshot of prison guards. On a recent visit, Mondros wrote, he and a defense investigator were on one side of a Plexiglas window while McCoy stood in a cubicle on the other side with prison guards loitering behind him.
“Suffice it to say, this was no way to prepare for a capital murder trial,” Mondros wrote.
The state Supreme Court overturned McCoy’s conviction and death sentence last January, citing errors by the trial judge and “pervasive” unprofessional conduct by prosecutor R. David Favata. Favata’s conduct included vouching for a prosecution witness, lying to the court, and making disparaging and threatening remarks intended to be overheard by McCoy, who was representing himself.
In July, the Supreme Court ordered a six-month suspension for Favata, who had retired in March, and said he would have to establish his rehabilitation before he could practice law again.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press