EDWIN CHANDLER

Reason for Wrongful Conviction

Witness Misidentification, False Confession, Perjury or False Accusation, Incentivized Witness, Government Misconduct

Original Sentence

30 Years

More About the Case

On September 28, 1993, a man entered a gas station in Louisville, Kentucky and walked up the counter to purchase a bottle of beer. When Brenda Whitfield, the store clerk, rang up the sale and opened the register, the man drew a gun and fatally shot Ms. Whitfield. The assailant grabbed $32 from the cash register and fled the store. The police identified a witness, John Gray, who they questioned. Gray said he saw a heavyset black man, about five feet eight inches tall, come out of the store and throw something in the bushes.

Police also located a regular customer of the store, Melvin Carr, who saw the gunman enter the store and said the gunman appeared to be waiting for Carr to leave the store. Carr said this person was five eight to five feet ten inches tall and had a medium build.  However, for some unknown reason, the detective wrote down that Carr said the gunman was “tall and thin.” Police recovered the surveillance video from the store, but the video tape was taped over by police with an episode of “Late Show with David Letterman," erasing the surveillance footage entirely.

Louisville police detectives also interviewed a store employee who was not at the store at the time of the shooting and showed him photos from the surveillance video. The employee thought this person looked like one of his former neighbors, Edwin Chandler, but was not able to identify Chandler in a photo pack line up. Although Chandler was six foot two inches tall and had slim build at 175 pounds, and even though his fingerprints did not match the prints on the beer bottle, the police focused their investigation on Chandler and built a case around arresting him.

Chandler had an alibi. He had spent the night with his sister, Sonya Collins, as well as his girlfriend and neighbor watching a movie. Police threatened Collins, telling her that if she did not cooperate with the police and retract her statement that Chandler was with her that night, they would have social services remove her children from the home. Additionally, police offered Collins a $ 1,000 reward if she would change her statement to implicate her brother, but she refused to assist the police in framing her brother. The police next went to the neighbor’s house, Viacha Burley, a known crack addict. They offered Burley the $ 1,000 reward to concoct a story to implicate Chandler, so she made statements to help the police.

Chandler learned that the police had threatened to take his sister’s children away, so he went to the police station to tell them that he was not involved in the crime. The police interrogated Chandler for several hours, and Chandler agreed to take a polygraph, which he passed.  But the police lied to Chandler and told him that he had failed the polygraph, lied and said that the fingerprints on the bottle matched his fingerprints, and said that they would take his sister’s children away from her if he did not confess. They told Chandler that if he admitted the shooting was an accident, he would get a five year prison sentence. After being lied to by the police on so many fronts, and thinking that the police would take his sister’s children away, Chandler thought he had no reasonable option but to confess. He gave a taped statement about his involvement in the crime, which the police repeatedly interrupted to make Chandler correct his statement, being that Chandler’s false confession did not align with evidence that the police had collected at the crime scene. 

As part of the investigation, the Kentucky State Police Lab tested hair found in a stocking cap at the crime scene and compared it to Chandler’s hair, ultimately finding that the hairs did not match. Although the law requires this kind of evidence to be disclosed to the defense, the information was never turned over to Chandler’s attorney. The prosecution did not disclose that Carr had failed to identify Chandler as the gunman, or that both the eyewitnesses had described the gunman as being much shorter (by about half a foot) and much heavier than Chandler. A jury convicted Chandler of manslaughter and first-degree robbery and sentenced him to 30 years. 

Chandler encountered John Gray in prison, and Gray told Chandler that he knew Chandler was innocent. Chandler’s lawyer contacted Gray, who had talked to the killer, Percy Phillips. When Gray confronted Phillips about the crime, Phillips confessed that he was the gunman who killed Brenda Whitfield. Chandler filed post-conviction motions, but none of these motions were successful. Chandler was released in 2002 and wrote to the Kentucky Innocence Project asking for help. The Kentucky Innocence Project searched to find the beer bottle to see if prints could be pulled and matched to Percy Phillips. The beer bottle was finally located in 2008, and the prints were tested and conclusively matched to Percy Phillips a year later.

On October 13, 2009, a grand jury indicted Phillips for the robbery and murder. That same day, Chandler’s convictions were vacated, and the prosecution dismissed the charges.

A Note About One Bad Cop:

The lead detective in Chandler’s case was Mark Handy, who was also involved in three other wrongful conviction cases: Garr Keith Hardin, Jeffrey Clark, and Keith West. Handy would eventually plead guilty to charges of perjury and evidence tampering and be sentenced to one year in prison.