Troy Coulston On November 22, 1989, 19-year-old Michael Haynesworth was found dead in the back seat of his car near Chamounix Drive and the Ridgeland Mansion, an 18th century home in West Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.
On January 23, 1992, a Philadelphia County jury convicted Christopher Wiliams and Troy Coulston of Haynesworth’s murder. Williams and Coulston were sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Eighteen months later, on August 6, 1993, another Philadelphia County jury convicted Williams and Theophalis Wilson of the September 25, 1989 murders of 22-year-old Otis Reynolds, 19-year-old Gavin Anderson, and his 17-year-old brother, Kevin Anderson. The three were found murdered in separate locations of Philadelphia,. Williams was sentenced to death. Wilson, who was 17 at the time of the killings, was sentenced to life in prison.
In December 2019, the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) moved to vacate Williams’s convictions for the triple murder and dismissed the charges against him. A month later, in January 2020, the CIU moved to vacate Wilson’s convictions for the triple murder and dismissed the charges.
Thirteen months later, on February 9, 2021, the CIU moved to vacate Williams’s conviction for the Haynesworth murder and dismissed the charges.
In March 2021, Coulston’s attorney, Jennifer Merrigan, filed a petition for relief seeking to vacate Coulston’s conviction in the Haynesworth murder. On November 30, 2021, the CIU moved to vacate Coulston’s conviction for the murder of Haynesworth and the charges were dismissed.
The unraveling of these murder prosecutions was the result of a re-investigation by defense lawyers and the CIU, headed by Assistant District Attorney Patricia Cummings. The re-investigation showed that not only had James White, the prosecution’s sole eyewitness to the triple murder and a key witness in the Haynesworth case, been discredited, but he had admitted his testimony implicating himself along with Williams and Wilson was false.
Moreover, a re-opening of the case by the CIU revealed a trove of police reports and information that pointed to other suspects and undermined other witnesses’ testimony in the prosecution’s case in the triple murder. The re-investigation revealed contradictory accounts by James White, which had never been disclosed. It also showed that prosecution witness David Lee had implicated himself in two other murders—that of Troy Brown and David Rice—but that information was never disclosed to Williams’s attorneys in either prosecution.
The newly disclosed information had been concealed by the trial prosecutor, David Desiderio, who denied any misconduct in the case.
At the time of the dismissal of the cases against Williams and Wilson, Cummings called the prosecution a “perfect storm” of injustice that included prosecutorial misconduct, an inadequate legal defense, and perjured testimony by White, who said he pled guilty to six murders to escape the death penalty after he was promised the possibility of release in just 15 years.
In January 2021, in the motion to vacate and dismiss the charges in the Haynesworth murder, Cummings wrote: “Williams’ conviction was built on a house of cards that began to collapse in 2019 when the Commonwealth opened up its files to the defense. Once the light was allowed to shine, the Commonwealth was forced to see that the basic structure underpinning the conviction was built on the unscrupulous behavior of several bad actors.”
White was 19 when he was arrested in December 1989 for the murder of Haynesworth, who had dated White’s 13-year-old girlfriend. Haynesworth was found in a car with shotgun wounds to his head, left arm, and left leg. He was blindfolded with a necktie, and his hands and feet were bound with pieces of gray telephone cord.
White subsequently was also charged with the murder of 19-year-old Marron Genrette, who had been gunned down on June 25, 1989. The charges were filed after White’s attorney negotiated a deal with David Desiderio, the assistant district attorney handling the cases. The deal required White to plead guilty to the murders of Haynesworth and Genrette and identify anyone who participated in the crimes. In return, White was to receive two consecutive prison sentences of five to 10 years for a total sentence of 10 to 20 years.
After the deal was in place, White implicated Williams in the Haynesworth and Genrette murders. He also described a third murder—the fatal shooting of cab driver William Graham on February 18, 1989. Williams, 29, was arrested for the Genrette murder on December 16, 1989.
Police believed that Williams was the head of a drug gang that robbed other drug dealers and eliminated anyone in their way by killing them. White would later admit that Williams was actually little more than a small-time drug dealer who sold $5 bags.
Desiderio also questioned White about the murders of the Anderson brothers and Reynolds, but White said he knew nothing about those killings.
Weeks later, Desiderio arranged for White to be brought to the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s office, where Desiderio said that a prison inmate claimed that White had admitted taking part in the murders of Reynolds and the Anderson brothers. White denied any knowledge of these murders. He would later testify that in response, Desiderio said his plea deal was being torn up and that he would be charged with all six murders. Desiderio said he would seek the death penalty against White.
According to White, Desiderio said he could plead guilty to all six murders in return for his testimony against Williams and any others whom White said were involved. White would receive a life sentence, but Desiderio would write a letter to the parole board so that he could be released after 15 years. White, however, said Desiderio instructed him not to reveal that part of the deal, which was not memorialized in any way in the plea agreement.
White then implicated Williams and Wilson. Police believed Wilson was a part of Williams’s gang and had previously questioned him, but he denied involvement in the murders of the Anderson brothers and Reynolds. White also implicated Rick Bennett, another alleged member of Williams’s gang, in the murders of Reynolds and the Anderson brothers.
White also implicated Williams, then Bennett, and then a man named James McArthur in the murder of Graham. White, who variously gave three separate and conflicting accounts of the shooting of Graham, said that he killed Graham after Williams said White had to commit a murder to gain entry to the gang. White asserted that when he expressed some nervousness about committing the murder, Williams said, “Take it easy, young buck. Soon death will be all around you.”
On February 28, 1991, Williams was charged with the murder of Haynesworth. Coulston, 21, was arrested on March 14, 1991. He was charged after White implicated him in the crime as well.
In December 1991, Williams went to trial for the Genrette murder and was acquitted. A month later, in January 1992 Williams and Coulston went to trial for the Haynesworth murder.
The prosecution’s case relied primarily on the testimony of White as well as Rashida Salaam, who was White’s girlfriend, and David Lee, a federal informant who had once, for a brief time, been married to Theophalis Wilson’s aunt.
Salaam, who was prosecuted as a juvenile and pled guilty to third-degree murder, had given police three different accounts of what happened. Police were led to her after two of Haynesworth’s friends said they were with Haynesworth when he got a page from Salaam and left them to go meet her.
Ultimately, Salaam said that she lured Haynesworth to a street corner so that her boyfriend, whom she identified as “Jim Robertson,” and his friends, whom she said were “Saleem” and “Chris,” could rob him. She said that Haynesworth was forced into his car and driven away by Jim and Saleem and that Chris followed in his own car. She said she had waited at an apartment at 4764 Chestnut Street, and the three men came back hours later without Haynesworth. That narrative changed as well by the time of trial.
Police executed a search warrant at the apartment and arrested White, who, it turned out, lived there.
White testified that he planned the murder of Haynesworth with Salaam and Williams and that Coulston was not present. White said that Haynesworth came to the Chestnut Street apartment at about 5 p.m. in response to Salaam’s page. There Coulston, holding a shotgun, forced Haynesworth to the ground and blindfolded him with a necktie. White said Williams bound Haynesworth’s hands and feet with the phone cord.
For three hours, White said, they interrogated and beat Haynesworth as they sought information about whom he sold drugs to and where he kept his money. Coulston hit Haynesworth with the shotgun and with a hammer and walked on Haynesworth’s head. Eventually, White said, they decided to kill Haynesworth with the shotgun because it couldn’t be traced, while the nine-millimeter pistol that Williams carried was new and traceable.
White said they put a blanket over Haynesworth and a baseball cap on his head and marched Haynesworth to his car. They put him in the back seat with Coulston. White drove the car followed by Williams. At Fairmount Park, White said, Williams parked on the street while White pulled onto the grass near a line of trees.
White said he and Coulston then got out of Haynesworth’s car and Coulston shot twice, began to walk away, then turned around and shot Haynesworth two more times. According to White, Coulston said he wanted to make sure that Haynesworth wasn’t pretending to be dead after the first two blasts.
During questioning by Assistant District Attorney Desiderio, White said he expected to serve the rest of his life in prison.
Salaam testified that she was in the bedroom of the Chestnut Street apartment when Haynesworth was interrogated and beaten. She said she cleaned up blood from the floor after they left and was there when they returned. They told her that Haynesworth was dead, she said.
Lee testified that he had purchased a nine-millimeter gun for Williams. Lee also claimed—for the first time—that Williams asked if he knew where to buy hand grenades. This testimony was presented to support Salaam’s claim that Williams had threatened to blow up Salaam’s mother’s house.
On January 23, 1992, the jury convicted Williams of first-degree murder, kidnapping, robbery, conspiracy, and possession of an instrument of a crime. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Coulston was convicted of the same charges and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Subsequently, McArthur pled guilty to the murder of Graham and was sentenced to five to 15 years in prison.
In July 1993, Williams, Wilson (who had been arrested on March 4, 1992), and Bennett went to trial for the murders of Reynolds and the Anderson brothers. Simultaneously, Williams and Bennett stood trial for the murder of Graham, the taxi driver.
White testified that Reynolds and the Anderson brothers were lured to Philadelphia under the promise of being sold two AK-47 assault rifles, but that he and the others actually intended to rob them.
White said that at Williams’s request, he stole a van to use in the robbery. On the afternoon of September 25, 1989, White said that Wilson picked up the victims and drove them to a home where Williams, White, Bennett, and a gang member named “Steve” were waiting. After the three handed over $2,400, Williams retrieved an AK-47 from a closet and pointed it at the victims. At that point, White said, he, Wilson, and Bennett all drew weapons and forced the victims to get on the floor.
Williams demanded more money. After first denying they had any more, one of the victims agreed to take Williams to get more money. Williams, Bennett, and “Steve” left with one of the victims and returned about 30 minutes later with $24,000 in cash. The victim was not with them, White said.
Williams then demanded more money from the two other victims, White testified. When they said there was none, Williams, Bennett, White, and another unnamed gang member forced the two victims into the van. Wilson and “Steve” were ordered to accompany them in a separate vehicle, a Cadillac.
White said the van followed the Cadillac, driving around Philadelphia as Williams and Bennett interrogated the two remaining victims about money. White said the unnamed gang member was driving and that he was in the front passenger seat. When the victims repeatedly denied having any more money, Williams pulled out his nine-millimeter pistol and shot the smaller of the victims (Kevin Anderson) two or three times in the face while Anderson was “looking directly” at Williams.
White said that the victim “just slumped over in the van and the other…young man who was in the van got hysterical and he started trying to fight and he knocked the gun out of Christopher Williams’s hand and he tried to run to the front of the van where myself and the other guy was driving at.”
“Rick Bennett then grabbed the young man and restrained him and pushed him back to where Christopher was at and Christopher Williams started smacking him around,” White said. He said Williams asked the victim if he wanted to end up like his dead companion.
White said that Williams and Bennett then opened the back of the van, picked up the dead victim by his feet and hands and “fired him right out the back” onto the street.
White said, “We kept driving. Christopher Williams was asking him (the third victim), ‘Do you want to die?’”
“Christopher Williams then took out his gun and pointed at the [third] guy’s face. I turned around in my seat because I knew what was going to happen next,” White said. “I didn’t want to see it.”
White said he heard two gunshots. “And the back of the van opened up and I assume [Williams] threw the guy out of the van because he wasn’t there when I turned around.”
A police officer testified that Reynolds was discovered on a cobblestone driveway in a residential neighborhood shortly around 11:30 p.m. on September 25. He had been shot twice in the side of the head. At 7:22 am on September 26, Kevin Anderson’s body was found a mile and a half away from Reynolds’s body. Kevin Anderson was face down on the sidewalk and had gunshot wounds in the back and on the left side of his head.
A couple of hours later, police found Gavin Anderson’s body, a half-mile from his brother. He was face down in a parking area more than 20 feet from the street. He had been shot three times—in the right cheek, the right temple, and the back of the neck.
Three different assistant medical examiners performed the autopsies on the victims. During cross-examination by Jack McMahon, Wilson’s defense attorney, medical examiner Dr. Paul Hoyer established there were no scrapes or bruises on Reynolds or Gavin Anderson.
Dr. Hygow Park, another medical examiner, testified that there were no injuries other than gunshot wounds on Kevin Anderson. Dr. Hoyer testified that whether a person would sustain additional injuries, such as scrapes, bruises, abrasions, and contusions, from a fall after a shooting would depend on the surface upon which the person fell, the speed of travel, and whether the surface was wet or dry. The absence of such injuries in the victims, he said, meant only that the body “did not fall against a hard surface with a lot of force.”
Judge Paul Ribner repeatedly sustained prosecution objections to McMahon’s cross-examination and ridiculed McMahon’s attempts to pose hypothetical questions about unlikely circumstances in which someone could be shot and hurled from a van but fail to sustain other injuries. At one point, the judge said, “Look, if someone is thrown from a moving van and lands on a pile of soft rags, that would have no effect. The doctor cannot answer a question based on his examination as to exactly what happened to a body after the shooting.”
McMahon gave up in frustration, saying, “Obviously, we are not going to be allowed to ask this. We have nothing further.”
In response, Judge Ribner stated, “I will ask the jury to disregard that rather silly remark by Mr. McMahon. This court has the duty of allowing all proper questions and not allowing a lot of nonsensical questions.”
Williams’s defense attorney asked no questions of the medical examiners.
Lee testified in this trial that he had purchased the nine-millimeter pistol that police seized from Williams at the time of Williams’s arrest. Lee said that while he knew he had committed criminal acts by purchasing guns for other people, and was subject to possible prosecution for those acts, he was testifying without any agreement from law enforcement. He testified that he had absolutely no expectation of leniency and that in fact, he was very worried about potential prosecution for the gun purchases. He testified that the federal government was looking at him “very, very hard.” He testified that he was a simple “tree surgeon” who expected to be prosecuted because “if you do the crime, you got to do the time.”
He also testified that he was “squeaky clean” and that he never “even had a parking ticket.”
Chris Vaughn testified that while in prison, White told him he committed the three murders with “Chris” in Philadelphia. Vaughn was the inmate informant who spoke with Desiderio, leading to the withdrawal of White’s original plea agreement.
Marian Anderson, sister to the Anderson brothers, testified that they had no criminal backgrounds. Kevin was a high school student and Gavin was an HVAC trainee, she said. In addition, she testified that during jury selection, Williams looked over at her and hung his head. She claimed she recognized him as having been at her home with her brothers 10 to 17 days before their deaths. She also said she told Desiderio and detectives about this prior visit at the beginning of trial, but no such statement had been disclosed to the defense.
On August 6, 1993, the jury convicted Williams and Wilson of first-degree murder, robbery, conspiracy, possession of an instrument of crime, and violating the state corrupt organizations act. Williams was acquitted of the murder of Graham. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on Bennett in the Graham murder and the court declared a mistrial on that charge. Bennett was acquitted of the other charges. Williams was sentenced to death, and Wilson was sentenced to life in prison.
Williams’s appeals were unsuccessful, although the corrupt organizations charge was dismissed because it was ruled unconstitutional in another case. In 2011, White filed a petition seeking to overturn his convictions. In an affidavit, he asserted that his testimony against Williams and Wilson was false in the prosecution for the murders of Reynolds and the Anderson brothers.
In 2013, Williams was granted a new trial following an evidentiary hearing during which White testified that his trial testimony was a lie—he knew nothing about the crime. He also said that he agreed to testify against Williams and Wilson only after Desiderio promised him he would try to get him released after 15 years. Desiderio denied making that claim during the hearing.
Perhaps more significantly, Williams’s appeals attorney, assistant federal defender Victor Abreu, presented medical testimony that directly contradicted White’s testimony about how the victims were shot.
Robert Tressell, chief criminal investigator for the Cobb County, Georgia District Attorney’s Office and an expert in blood pattern and spatter analysis, testified that the location of Gavin Anderson’s body was inconsistent with being pushed from a moving van. The blood evidence also was inconsistent with White’s description of what happened. Blood had pooled in the creases of Anderson’s ear; had the body been thrown, there would have been evidence of blood projected away from the ear, he said.
Kevin Anderson’s clothing showed that blood had begun to soak in, and the blood flow patterns were consistent with being shot and falling right in the place where his body was found, Tressell said. None of the blood patterns was consistent with being thrown from a moving vehicle. In addition, Tressell noted that the bullet removed from Kevin Anderson’s body was not consistent with having been fired by the nine-millimeter gun seized from Williams.
Tressell also said that the crime scene evidence and blood evidence was not consistent with Reynolds being shot and ejected from a vehicle.
He said that “all three of them received their injuries where they were found.”
Dr. Charles Wetli, former chief medical examiner for Suffolk County, New York, said that based on a review of the autopsy, the trial transcripts, and the crime scene reports, there was no evidence that any of the three victims were thrown from a moving vehicle. He also said there was no evidence that any of the victims were shot directly in the face as White claimed.
On December 30, 2013, Court of Common Pleas Judge William Manfredi granted Williams a new trial because his trial defense attorney had failed to retain a medical expert to confront the prosecution’s evidence. During the hearing, Williams’s trial defense attorney, Lee Mandell, admitted he had not consulted with any expert because he expected he would draw out the information through cross-examination of the medical examiners. Judge Manfredi noted, “Although his strategy was based on cross-examining the medical examiners, he made no effort to talk to them about their findings in this case before their testimony. Indeed, Mandell himself did not attempt even a single question of cross-examination” of the three medical examiners who testified for the prosecution.
The prosecution appealed the ruling and in July 2016, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the new trial ruling.
Wilson, meanwhile, had been unsuccessfully battling to overturn his conviction. In 2017, his case was remanded back to the trial court for resentencing after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Miller v. Alabama that it was unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to mandatory life sentences.
The law firm of Greenberg Traurig, led by Kelly Dobbs Bunting, began representing Wilson pro bono and in 2018, teamed up with the law firm of Phillips Black, whose team was led by Merrigan. At the same time, Williams’s case was back in the trial court, pending a retrial.
In May 2018, the Conviction Integrity Unit began a comprehensive review of Wilson’s case. At the same time, it began a review of Williams’s case. Subsequently, the Conviction Integrity Unit turned over to the defense a copy of the prosecution file—more than 40,000 pages of documents.
Williams’s attorney for the retrial, Wendy Ramos of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, subsequently moved to bar Williams’s retrial. Ramos said that the prosecution’s recent disclosure included exculpatory information that had not been disclosed prior to Williams’s trial.
This included reports showing there were multiple possible other suspects, including a powerful Jamaican drug dealer, as well as members of the Jamaican Shower Posse and the Junior Black Mafia. The reports indicated that the three victims were caught in an ongoing dispute between these two “extremely violent gangs, either of which may have been responsible for their deaths.”
Other information that had originally been withheld included:
--A report of a 911 call made at 12:41 a.m. on the morning of September 26, 1989, one block from where Kevin Anderson’s body was found. In that call, a gas station employee reported that someone had just knocked on the window of the gas station and asked him to call police because a man had been shot at 32nd & Berks Street. There was no mention of a man being thrown out of a van. This lead was never investigated.
--A statement from the father of the Anderson brothers that his daughter got a call from one of the brothers at 6 p.m.—after the time that White said the murders had occurred. In addition, the father said that Reynolds had an argument with someone named Kevin who was looking for him claiming that Reynolds had robbed him.
--A statement of a witness who said that at 11 p.m. on September 25, 1989, she heard four shots a block from where one of the victims was found. This also was several hours after White said the murders occurred.
--Homicide activity reports that said the Anderson brothers were involved in drug running, selling drugs, and robbing drug dealers, which could have been used to impeach the testimony of Marian Anderson that her brothers had no criminal backgrounds.
--Reports showing that David Lee, who said he sold guns to Williams, had previously provided prosecution testimony in two murders, one of which he had a role in and had not been prosecuted. This cast doubt on Lee’s claims that he was “squeaky clean” and feared possible prison time for buying guns for Williams. One of those prior prosecutions was handled by Desiderio and the other by McMahon, Wilson’s trial defense lawyer, who had formerly been a prosecutor. Williams’s lawyer said that Desiderio hid all information regarding Lee's involvement in those cases from defense counsel at the time of the original trial, preventing Williams’s trial defense lawyer from impeaching Lee's credibility.
--Multiple reports and notes of correspondence between Desiderio and White, and Desiderio and White's mother, suggesting that the prosecutor would help White get released early.
--A statement from a witness who said he saw Gavin Anderson struggling with someone just before he was shot and later identified that person by name as someone who was frequently seen in the neighborhood where the shooting occurred.
On December 18, 2019, Cummings moved to vacate Williams’s convictions, saying that the prosecution believed that White testified falsely and that the physical evidence demonstrated the falsity of his account of the murders. The motion was granted and the charges were dismissed. Williams, however, remained in prison because of his conviction for the murder of Haynesworth. The CIU re-investigation of that case was still in progress, based primarily on White’s involvement.
On January 21, 2020, based on a similar motion filed by the Conviction Integrity Unit, Wilson’s convictions were vacated, the charges were dismissed, and he was released.
The motion said that evidence withheld by the prosecution included reports that prior to their murders, Reynolds and the Anderson brothers had been running a drug operation in Philadelphia that had been wrested from their control by a drug kingpin named Noel Grierson, also known as “Steplight.” In fact, Grierson had physically assaulted the three and robbed them of a large quantity of narcotics. In response, Reynolds and the Anderson brothers robbed one of Steplight’s drug houses in Philadelphia. Three weeks later, Reynolds and the brothers were murdered. An undisclosed homicide activity sheet revealed that police identified Grierson as “the prime suspect” in the triple homicide.
The undisclosed reports showed an extensive police investigation of Grierson (who was never charged), including searches of the state department of motor vehicles records, property record searches, criminal history searches, and a memo detailing the locations of several businesses. Other reports said that a member of the Junior Black Mafia street gang claimed responsibility for killing Reynolds and the Andersons because they had started providing protection for a Jamaican narcotics operation located in territory controlled by the Junior Black Mafia.
The motion also noted that some of the undisclosed material had been requested by Williams’s attorney in preparation for Williams’s retrial, but that assistant district attorneys Bridget Kirn and Alisa Shver contended there was nothing in the file to be disclosed.
During the hearing when Wilson’s charges were dismissed, Cummings said, “It is time for Mr. Wilson to be allowed to go home—that he go home a free man, and that he go home with an apology. No words can express what we put these people through—what we put Mr. Wilson through; what we put his family through.”
In February 2021, the CIU and Williams’s attorney, Stuart Lev from the Federal Community Defender Office, jointly moved to vacate and dismiss the charges in the Haynesworth case. “After a thorough investigation, the [defense and prosecution agree] that White’s testimony is not credible in this case, because White has repeatedly falsely implicated Williams in other homicides, White’s narrative of the Haynesworth crime is inconsistent with the available physical evidence, and White has provided multiple inconsistent accounts of the crime to other witnesses,” the motion said.
For example, White said Coulston and Williams kicked Haynesworth in the abdomen, and that Coulston struck Haynesworth with a hammer and walked on his head. The motion noted that the autopsy report said that Haynesworth’s “scalp, forehead, face, neck, trunk and extremities show no evidence of other injuries.”
White claimed that Haynesworth’s hands were bound behind his back, but crime scene photos showed his hands were tied in front of him. White claimed the bindings on Haynesworth’s feet were loose enough for him to walk to his car. However, police testified that his feet were tightly bound together.
White said Haynesworth was shot while in the back seat of the car. However, the medical examiner’s report said that dried grass was found on Haynesworth’s face, left wrist, left sleeve, and left pant leg—suggesting he was shot while on the ground and then placed in his car.
The motion said that Lee also was an unreliable witness. During questioning by Desiderio, Lee falsely testified that he had only met with Desiderio a week prior to the trial. Desiderio did not correct that testimony. In addition, Desiderio failed to disclose that Lee was involved in other murders, that he was the subject of a federal investigation for federal firearms violations, and that he was a registered informant.
And the motion said that Rashida Salaam’s prior statements and trial testimony were “too inconsistent to be credible.”
The CIU also sought DNA testing of the gloves, necktie, and phone cord ligatures, but no “probative evidence” was obtained. Four fingerprints found on Haynesworth’s car did not produce an identification, but Williams, Coulston, Salaam, and White were excluded. This information was known at the time of the trial. During the CIU re-investigation, the prints were submitted to a national fingerprint database and three people were identified as the source of the prints. The CIU investigation "yielded no connections between these three people and the crime,” the motion said.
On February 9, 2021, Philadelphia County Common Pleas Court Judge Tracy Brandeis-Roman, who called the case “mind-boggling,” granted the motion to vacate Williams’s convictions in the Haynesworth case and granted the motion to dismiss the case. Williams then was released.
In September 2021, the CIU filed a response to Merrigan’s petition for relief. The CIU noted that in seeking to vacate and dismiss Williams’s conviction for the Haynesworth murder, it said that the case against Williams collapsed because it was built “on a house of cards.”
“Once the collapse began, a complete collapse was inevitable,” the petition, signed by Assistant District Attorneys Arlyn Katen and Michael Garmisa, said. “The Commonwealth now recognizes that the same collapse entitles Coulston to the same relief.”
On November 30, Judge Scott DiClaudio granted the motion to vacate Coulston’s conviction. The prosecution dismissed the case. Coulson was not released, however, because he was convicted in 1999 of an assault on a prisoner. The charge carried a mandatory life sentence because Coulston was serving a life sentence.
Attorney Ben Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center sought to vacate that sentence based on a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that a conviction for an assault by a prisoner serving life “cannot stand” when the underlying life sentence is vacated.
In June 2022, the sentence was vacated and Coulston pled guilty to aggravated assault. He was resentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison with eligibility for parole in October 2022.
Coulston filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in October 2023 seeking compendsation for his wrongful conviction.
– Maurice Possley
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