South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Guilty verdict reached in Casey’s Nickelodeon retrial
Next step is for jury to decide if Ibar should be executed
The last time Pablo Ibar was put on trial for murder, he ended up on death row.
That was 19 years ago.
He may be on his way back. A jury once again determined on Saturday that Ibar, 46, is guilty of the 1994 murders of Casimir “Butch Casey” Sucharski, Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers.
The decision was announced Saturday morning after 22 hours of deliberation over four days.
The next step is for the same jury to return in February to listen to evidence from both sides — this time to determine whether Ibar should be executed.
Ibar’s visibly distraught wife, father and brother left the courthouse without commenting Saturday morning. Rogers’ mother and Sucharski’s daughter were escorted from the building by deputies.
Anderson’s sister, Deborah Bowie, said in a telephone interview that she was gratified by the decision.
“It’s been almost 25 years,” Bowie said. “That’s how old Sharon was when she died… It still hurts today like it did in 1994. It’s no different.”
Sucharski, Anderson and Rogers were killed June 6, 1994, at Sucharski’s home in Miramar. The murders were captured on surveillance video that Sucharski secretly recorded.
Even so, the prosecution’s quest to bring the murderers to justice has been long and, in their eyes, only partly successful.
Ibar and his original co-defendant, Seth Penalver, were identified as suspects early on.
But the video footage was grainy. The gunman prosecutors identified as Penalver never took off the cap partly concealing his face. The man identified as Ibar wore a T-shirt over his head for most of the video; once the three victims were dead he took it off and walked right in front of the camera.
Prosecutors used still frames from that video to help identify Ibar — his own mother told investigators it looked like her son, until Pablo Ibar is led into court as the jury deliberated at his murder trial.
she realized the source of the image.
Ibar and Penalver were tried together in 1997. The trial lasted eight months. At the end of it, the jury could not reach a unanimous decision.
For the next proceedings, the defendants were tried separately. Penalver went first with another marathon trial in 1999. At the end of it he was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Next came Ibar. His trial did not last as long, but it had the same result — a guilty verdict followed by a death sentence.
That turned out to be only the beginning of a lengthy appeals process — Penalver was granted a new trial in 2006 when the Florida Supreme Court ruled some of the evidence used by prosecutors was inadmissible.
But Ibar’s conviction stood. Penalver’s last trial was in 2012. After five months, a jury took 10 days to reach its conclusion — not guilty. Penalver was freed hours later.
Still, Ibar remained behind bars. In his native Spain, where his father was a famed Jai alai player, Ibar became a popular cause for opponents of the death penalty — supporters raised money to fund his defense.
His next break came in 2016, when the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the attorney at his original trials provided ineffective counsel. One significant issue raised by the court was the failure of the defense to call an expert in facial recognition to challenge the prosecution’s belief that Ibar was the man in the video.
Unlike Penalver, Ibar went into his third trial with a case that only seemed to get stronger for the prosecution. The T-shirt worn over the head of the second gunman had been left at the scene. Previous efforts to connect it to Ibar had been unsuccessful.
But over time, DNA technology improved. In 2010, Ibar asked an independent DNA expert to test the shirt again to see if it would match another potential suspect. It did not.
Six years later, preparing for trial for a fifth time in the same case, prosecutors William Sinclair and Chuck Morton asked the same expert to compare the shirt to Ibar’s DNA. This time, they got a match.
Benjamin Waxman, who won the appeal for Ibar and was one of four defense lawyers on the trial, said the DNA evidence was probably decisive.
“I think that was the primary consideration for this jury,” he said. “The issues are extremely complicated.”
One of the other defense lawyers, Kevin Kulik, said he was confident that the conviction will be overturned on appeal.
Morton, who led the prosecution for every trial in the case, said he was pleased with the outcome, but he declined to comment further because the case is ongoing. Morton had retired in 2013 but was brought back to help Sinclair and prosecutor Katya Palmiotto navigate a mountain of evidence that he knew better than anyone.
“I know this is their job,” said Bowie. “But it is beyond the scope of anybody’s job to do what Chuck Morton has done. I cannot tell you how much that has meant to our family.”
For Broward Circuit Judge Dennis Bailey to sentence Ibar to death, the jury that convicted him must decide unanimously that the penalty is warranted. Pablo Ibar, center, is handcuffed after a jury finds him guilty of the 1994 murders of Casimir Sucharski, Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers. In the foreground are prosecutors Chuck Motron (left), Katya Palmiotto and William Sinclair. A two-story-building was heavily damaged by smoke and flames in Dania Beach, fire officials said.