On the night of February 25, 1982, two elderly tourists were unloading their car at a Howard Johson motel in Osceola County, Florida when two men approached. One fired two shots, striking the female victim in the chest before fleeing. The second man briefly reached into the car before also running away. While her husband survived this incident, the female victim tragically died from her gunshot wounds. Anthony was wrongfully implicated by a tipster who heard about a reward offer on the radio and provided unreliable information to authorities in exchange for the monetary award. At trial the State presented this tipster and an unreliable jailhouse informant, who testified that Anthony confessed to the crime but later recanted, stating that he fabricated the confession in order to obtain a lighter sentence on his own pending charges. Despite two perpetrators committing this crime, the State never identified the second perpetrator. Most notably, the victim’s husband, who himself was the sole surviving witness to the crime, did not believe Anthony was one of the perpetrators and yet he was not presented as a witness at trial.

 

We are thrilled that Anthony is no longer behind the walls of Florida’s prison system and has been reunited with his family. IPF is concerned, however, that Anthony remains wrongfully convicted despite the only two pieces of evidence used to convict Anthony Marshall having been discredited and the one witness to the crime, who himself was a victim, believed Anthony was innocent. He will still spend his first year out in a halfway house and be burdened, for possibly many years, by onerous conditions of parole where one minor misstep could send him right back to his wrongful incarceration.  In short, while physically not in custody, Anthony is not truly free. The fight for his freedom must continue.