Pablo Ibar, Hispanic-American citizen son of Cuban mothersentenced last April to life imprisonment in Florida for a triple murder committed in 1994, said he was devastated after learning that his sentence was upheld.
“I no longer know what else I can do to prove my innocence and have a fair trial,” Ibar said in a handwritten message sent to the Pablo Ibar-Fair Trial Associationbroadcast this Monday on Twitter, on the 29th anniversary of the events for which he is serving the aforementioned sentence.
Ibar also considered that the latest decision of the Florida Court of Appeals is like a “death sentence” and that he feels “destroyed.”
In the message, he describes the decision of the Court of Appeals for the 4th District of Florida as a “lack of justice, since they rejected the arguments of his lawyer, Joe Nascimento, who had requested the revocation of the life sentence and the holding of a new trial. with all the guarantees.
Likewise, he believes that this refusal by the Court without even justifying the reasons for its decision implies a new death sentence.
“I’m not on death row, but I still have a death sentence,” Ibar wrote in his message.
Last April, Florida Court of Appeals upheld life sentence and refused to revoke the life sentence imposed on Ibar and hold a new trial, a decision that the spokesman for the Pablo Ibar-Just Trial Association, Andrés Krakenberger, described as a “devastating blow” and “a great blow to the family”.
The hearing took place on February 28 at the Court of Appeals for the Fourth District of Florida.
Ibar’s defense attorney, Joe Nascimento, spoke of the errors that occurred in the trial held in 2019, in which a court again found him guilty of the crimes the owner of a Miramar nightclub and two models.
Nascimento alleged on that occasion the “insufficient” DNA evidence found on a T-shirt, the lack of connection with the three people murdered and the “inconsistency of the statement” of a key witness for the Prosecutor’s Office, among other elements, which made a total of 12.
But the Chamber ignored all these arguments and only explained its refusal in one of the 12 reasons: in which Judge Dennis Bailey, who acted in the last trial, was accused of partiality. In that process, a member of the jury denounced having suffered pressure from his colleagues to vote in favor of sanctioning Ibar, and later said on social networks that he regretted it.
In May 2022, the lawyer reported at a press conference on an appeal filed in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth District of Florida against the sentence of Judge Dennis Bailey, of Fort Lauderdale.
Pablo Ibar was charged with the murders of Casimir Sucharsky, a nightclub owner, and models Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers, on June 26, 1994.
The Spaniard was sentenced to death in 2000, sanction that was annulled in 2016 by the Supreme Court of Florida, which called the evidence “very weak.” Then the judge ordered a repeat trial, which took place in 2019, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
One of the main arguments of the defense is that in the 2000 trial, Ibar had a public defender who did not do his job well, since he did not request an expert facial recognition test in relation to a video, of very poor quality, in which the murderer is seen, and which was definitive at the time of convicting the Spaniard.
Another of the reasons he alleges is that the Police influenced a witness, a neighbor of the victims, to identify him.
