Retrial in killing of 3 ordered
Pablo Ibar will face jury for third time in slaying of nightclub owner, 2 others
The Florida Supreme Court has ordered a new trial for Pablo Ibar, who has been on death row for more than 15 years in connection with a notorious 1994 triple murder.
Ibar, 43, was sentenced to death in 2000 for the murders of Casimir “Butch Casey” Sucharski, the flashy former owner of the Casey’s Nickelodeon nightclub and Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers, two women he brought home with him on the same early morning two men chose to rob Sucharski’s house.
“It’s a great day for justice in Florida today, for sure,” said Ibar’s lawyer, Benjamin S. Waxman. “In the end, I think it had to do with their justifiable doubt that Pablo had anything to do with this.”
The court found that Ibar’s defense lawyer at trial, Kayo Morgan, failed to retain a facial recognition expert to challenge the prosecution’s evidence that Ibar was at
the scene of the crime. The brutal beating of Sucharski and all three murders were captured on home surveillance video, and the man believed to be Ibar left his face uncovered for part of the video.
Ibar’s former co-defendant, Seth Penalver, was granted a retrial after the Supreme Court found there was less certainty about whether he was the second robber and killer. Facial recognition experts testified for Penalver at his retrial in 2012, and he was acquitted.
Penalver, 42, reasserted his innocence Thursday andsaid he’s confident Ibar was also not one of the killers.
“The evidence actually points to two other people, and multiple other suspects that the police and the prosecutor knowingly and willfully withheld from the jury,” Penalver said.
Deborah Bowie, sister of murder victim Sharon Anderson, said she and her mother are struggling to accept the news.
“If you’re looking for a case where they use every single absurd defense legal tactic that this country allows people to employ to escape justice, look no further than this case,” Bowie said. “God himself could come down, take the stand and say these were the people who committed this crime, and our system would find a way to vacate the conviction and order a new trial.”
The decision breathes new life into a case that has already been one of the most expensive and timeconsuming in Broward County history.
Sucharski, 48, was the namesake of Casey’s Nickelodeon, a popular Pembroke Park nightspot that he owned. He brought Rogers and Anderson, both 25, to his home in the early morning of June 26, 1994, unaware that two men were preparing to burst in and rob him.
The ordeal was captured on video, which showed the robbers punching Sucharski, chasing Anderson to another room, and holding all three at gunpoint before shooting them to death.
Ibar and Penalver were indicted two months later. According to police, Ibar’s mother identified him from a still frame of the videotape before she knew it was taken at a crime scene. She later recanted.
The defendants went on trial in 1997. After eight months of testimony and arguments, jurors spent 27 hours deliberating and were unable to come to a unanimous verdict.
A judge decided to separate the cases, and prosecutors won a conviction against Penalver in 1999 after a six-month trial. Ibar’s trial, which lasted six weeks, ended with his conviction in June 2000.
“Good God, six years have been a long time, but it’s finally over,” Marie Rogers’ mother, Margaret Edwards, said then. But it wasn’t. Penalver and Ibar were sentenced to death, and both challenged their convictions.
Ibar, a citizen of Spain and son of a Spanish jai-alai player, became a celebrity in that country. Spanish officials met with then-Gov. Jeb Bush in 2003 to express their opposition to the death penalty. A Spanish nonprofit organization eventually hired Waxman to represent Ibar.
The Florida Supreme Court overturned Penalver’s conviction in 2006, but refused to do the same for Ibar, finding that any errors during Ibar’s retrial did not affect the outcome.
Penalver’s retrial in 2012 lasted five months and ended in a not guilty verdict.
In a 22-page decision released Thursday, a majority of the court’s justices
ruled that Ibar had now provided enough evidence to change their minds. “Ibar has established prejudice, given the relatively weak case against Ibar with no physical evidence linking him to the crime, the critical role of his identification derived from the video, and the errors we previously identified in Ibar’s direct appeal,” the justices wrote.
“Simply put, we cannot and do not have confidence in the outcome of this trial.”
Bowie, Anderson’s sister, said she was not looking forward to a fifth trial. “It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the absurdity that we have to deal with,” she said. “Five trials. There can’t be a case more screwed up than this one.”
Former Assistant State Attorney Chuck Morton, who shepherded the case from 1994 through Penalver’s acquittal, left the office in 2013. “We shall evaluate the evidence that remains available and admissible at trial in the case and proceed accordingly,” said Broward State Attorney’s Office spokesman Ron Ishoy.
Waxman, Ibar’s lawyer, said he will stick with the case until it’s resolved.
Morgan, Ibar’s attorney at the 1997 and 2000 trials, died in 2014.
“God himself could come down, take the stand and say these were the people who committed this crime, and our system would find a way to vacate the conviction.” Deborah Bowie, sister of Sharon Anderson