Philip Vance’s Postconviction Filing Kicked Back by Prosecutors to Wait For CRU Report
Philip Vance is serving a life sentence for a 2002 murder in South St. Paul during a robbery of Sabreen’s Supermarket, but his supporters have long believed this was a false charge after hearing Vance’s pleas of innocence. After waiting more than three years since he applied to Minnesota’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU), pressing it to investigate what he claims is a “wrongful conviction,” Vance‘s legal team filed a postconviction relief petition on February 27 with new evidence supporting Vance’s innocence and 12 affidavits of recanted testimony. The day after the motion was filed, the prosecuting Dakota County Attorney’s Office got approved by a judge to delay their response to Vance’s petition, giving them 45 days after they receive the CRU’s final report of Vance’s case. Nearly a month after Vance’s court filing, the CRU has yet to finalize Vance’s report.
Dakota County says (pdf) that “both parties have been informed that the CRU has nearly completed its work reviewing Petitioner’s conviction and that a final report is expected soon.” Vance and his legal team deny they’ve been informed of any such thing by the CRU, and Vance’s last meeting with them was a year ago in March 2024. See our report from last month, Done Waiting on CRU, Philip Vance Readies to File Legal Petition for Wrongful Conviction, for more.
Despite no physical DNA evidence linking him to the crime, Vance was convicted based on testimony of several jailhouse informants who have since recanted. Vance has proclaimed his innocence since day one: “I just want the world to know that I am innocent,” he stated at a press conference via a prison phone on December 22, 2024, the 22nd anniversary of the killing. Further throwing doubt on Vance’s guilt was an anonymous source who recently told Unicorn Riot they know the killers and Vance was not involved.
New sworn declarations have dramatically undermined Minnesota’s case against Vance. At least 12 witnesses that testified for the state against him in the 2004 trial have signed affidavits recanting their testimony. “The affidavits allow the Court to conclude that the jury might have reached a different conclusion without the recanted testimony,” notes Vance’s legal petition.
As Vance’s cycle of waiting gets reset, Unicorn Riot is publishing all of Vance’s recent court document filings, including the postconviction relief petition (pdf), which we briefly summarize below and that you can read along with Vance’s legal team’s memorandum to support the petition (pdf). Find all of the documents in our vault, including the affidavits of recanted testimony from statements that were used to support the original jury indictment and the later murder trial of Vance.
Jan. 8, 2025: Community Demands Exoneration for Philip Vance on 22nd Anniversary of Murder
Feb. 12, 2025: Source Claims Philip Vance is Wrongfully Convicted, Knows the Real Killer
Feb. 26, 2025: Done Waiting on CRU, Philip Vance Readies to File Legal Petition for Wrongful Conviction
Postconviction Relief Petition Documents
Vance’s case was investigated by the Metro Gang Strike Force (MGSF) which was disbanded in 2009 after a federal investigation uncovered police continually taking part in a myriad of illegal activities while on the job. “My whole case was set, built and convicted on police corruption,” Philip Vance told Unicorn Riot from a prison phone.
The postconviction petition quotes a 2009 federal investigative report on the MGSF (pdf) saying that the Strike Force routinely lost, “mislabeled and misappropriated evidence tied to criminal prosecutions … routinely violated the constitutional rights of detainees and criminal suspects” with warrantless searches and unlawful seizures. Officers engaged in extensive cover-up actions including shredding documents, throwing evidence into the garbage, and deleting files related to confidential informants. (Another investigative report in 2009 on the MGSF was published by the Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA), an office under the Minnesota Legislature that investigates allegations of misconduct, waste and poor performance in state agencies.)
An informant in Vance’s case claims it’s true the Strike Force coerced him into misdeeds. Maynard Cross says he was used by the MGSF to lie about Vance. Cross was in jail facing first-degree murder charges at the time of the investigation and claims police “asked me to incriminate Philip Vance for the crime. I told the officers I didn’t know anything about the case… The officers told me details about the crime and about Philip Vance… [I] was being fed information by those investigators, then the investigators must have either lost or destroyed the tapes.”
Informants were often incentivized to provide false testimony with less jail time, dropped charges and even money. This was a common occurrence and a pattern in Minnesota’s Twin Cities metro area. In five similar cases in Minneapolis, Black youth were given life sentences based on jailhouse informants for murders in the 2000s that they claim they didn’t actually commit: Myon Burrell, Marvin Haynes, Mahdi Ali, Deaunteze Bobo and Jermaine Ferguson.
Marvin Haynes‘ teenage cousin was threatened with decades in prison if he didn’t lie in testimony against Haynes for a 2004 Minneapolis murder. Haynes has since been exonerated after his postconviction relief petition was heard in a Hennepin County courtroom in late 2023.
Numerous informants were used by authorities in Vance’s case and as noted, 12 witnesses have recanted their testimonies saying they were coerced, threatened or incentivized by the police to make up lies that Philip Vance committed the murder of Khaled Al-Bakri at Sabreen’s Supermarket.
Vance’s postconviction relief petition states that Vance was “deprived of due process by the actions of MGSF investigators and copious false testimony, given at the behest of MGSF investigators and because of coercive and bad faith police tactics. Mr. Vance has spent more than 21 years in prison because of this unlawful and bad faith conduct. The evidence of Mr. Vance’s innocence and wrongful conviction is substantial and justifies granting him an evidentiary hearing.”
The petition lays out 11 reasons Vance is seeking relief:
- False evidence provided by Melissa Stites (testimony, statements): “She was explicitly instructed by police officers to give false testimony in Mr. Vance’s case and at his trial.”
- False evidence provided by Regina Hagerman (testimony, statements).
- False evidence provided by Maynard Cross (testimony, statements) as noted above.
- Defective indictment that relied on false and inculpatory grand jury testimony provided by Maynard Cross, Regina Hagerman and Jacqueline Ezell.
- False evidence provided by Dontay Reese (testimony, statements). Reese “was promised leniency in his own criminal matter by investigators in Mr. Vance’s case.”
- False evidence provided by Trevor Crawford (testimony, statements). Crawford recanted trial testimony and said investigators threatened to involve his older brother in the case so he lied on Vance.
- Defective conviction because the state acted in bad faith when it failed to disclose Brady, Giglio, and Youngblood evidence in criminal discovery.
- Defective conviction because Vance was “prevented from presenting an alibi defense despite having alibi witnesses available to testify… through a combination of witness tampering by police and ineffective assistance of trial counsel.”
- Vance was denied his Sixth and 14th Amendment right to effective counsel. Vance’s “trial and appellate counsels’ representation fell below the standard of reasonableness and prejudicially affected the outcome of the proceedings.”
- Vance was denied his Sixth and 14th Amendment right to effective trial counsel that failed to present alternative-perpetrator evidence at trial.
- Vance was denied his Sixth and 14th Amendment right to effective trial counsel that failed to investigate and present alibi witnesses.
Vance’s current attorneys, Nico Ratkowski and Andrew Irlbeck, are calling for a hearing and for Vance’s first-degree premeditated murder, first-degree felony murder and second-degree felony murder convictions be “vacated and set aside.”
Incarcerated for over 21 years, Vance continues to stay hopeful for his release despite the renewed waiting game. CRU staff declined to speak to Unicorn Riot about Vance’s case. The last investigative report CRU officially released was in late July 2024 — for the now-freed-from-prison Edgar Barrientos-Quintana — so, one can assume they’re perhaps overdue for their next report.
Read the 16-page petition and the 74-page memorandum supporting the petition, below.
See all of the documents filed by Vance’s legal team along with the postconviction relief petition in our document vault.
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