In 2001, a prosecutor and a police officer zeroed in on a child who they claimed could shed some much-needed light on a yearslong Louisiana murder investigation. But in reality, the law enforcement agents had pinpointed a suspect of choice, constructed a story around him, and then coerced a juvenile witness into adopting that story.
The next year, the man at the center of the investigation—Michael Wearry—was convicted of and sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of Eric Walber, after Livingston Parish District Attorney Scott Perrilloux and Sheriff's Detective Marlon Foster strong-armed Jeffrey Ashton, a young teenager facing his own separate charges, to implicate him. They allegedly fed Ashton a tale putting Wearry at the crime scene. They lied about the results of a photo line-up, indicating Ashton had selected Wearry as the culprit when he expressly picked other people. And they hid instances where Ashton departed from the agents' chosen story. All of this despite the fact that Ashton was at a strawberry festival the night of the crime, and that he maintained he'd never seen Wearry prior to Perrilloux and Foster introducing him to his picture.
