Earl Charles’s Story
In May of 1975, a jury convicted Earl Charles of murdering Max and Fred Rosenstein in a furniture store in Savannah, Georgia on October 3, 1974. Charles was sentenced to die by electrocution. Despite the conviction, Charles maintained his innocence until his exoneration in 1978. . Critical exculpatory information was never given to the defense until years after his conviction.
The Eyewitnesses
The only eyewitnesses to the crime were the surviving victims: Myra Rosenstein, who was unable to offer any description to the police; and Bessie Corcelius, who could provide only a general description of the assailants. The slugs recovered from the victims, some fingerprints, and Corcelius’s description comprised the only available leads.
The police initially focused on Earl Charles because of his prior record and their mistaken belief that he left town shortly after the murders. In reality, he had moved from Savannah to Tampa, Florida a month before the murders, along with his neighbor Michael Williams and Williams’s girlfriend.
Several weeks later, police in Florida took Charles, Williams, and two others into custody for the Savannah murders. One of the other men, James Nixon, would eventually provide testimony implicating Charles. Though neither witness had been able to make a positive identification, Savannah detective F.W. Wade took both Myra Rosenstein and Corcelius to Florida to provide the identification needed to extradite Earl Charles and Michael Williams to Georgia. Despite their repeated failure to identify Charles when presented with his photograph, both witnesses pointed him out of a lineup as the shooter during extradition proceedings. In fact, Myra Rosenstein acknowledged that, “I could have made a mistake.” Although the identification testimony was dangerously problematic, it went unchallenged during the trial.
Undisclosed Evidence
The witnesses’ repeated failure to identify Earl Charles from the mug books and the overall suggestive nature of the identification process was not disclosed to the defense before trial. In addition, when police later showed the witnesses another more recent photo of Charles, they again failed to identify him as the assailant, another fact that went undisclosed to the defense.
Although both witnesses eventually testified with confidence at trial, their initial hesitations were not disclosed - the defense was thus unaware that the witnesses had repeatedly failed to identify Charles in the days following the crime and did not have the information available to challenge the identifications or present evidence to the jury of the suggestive nature of the identification procedures.
Most importantly, the defense did not receive complete and accurate information regarding a jailhouse informant whose testimony proved to be pivotal in Charles’s wrongful conviction. The testimony of James Nixon, who claimed Charles had bragged about shooting “a man and a little boy” in a furniture store in Savannah, constituted a strong piece of the prosecution’s case.
The Trial
At trial, Nixon would insist that he had no deal with authorities in which he would benefit in exchange for his testimony. In fact, it was not discovered until the civil trial that Detective Wade had, in fact, written the Governor of Florida recommending Nixon be released from prison because of his help in convicting Earl Charles. Letter correspondence between Detective Wade and James Nixon also illustrated that Nixon expected help towards his release in exchange for his testimony.
Because this evidence was excluded during pretrial discovery procedures, Charles’s defense attorneys were unable to offer this compelling evidence of Nixon’s incentive to lie to the jury.
At trial, the prosecution relied on Nixon’s testimony and the testimony of the eyewitnesses. Charles’s defense rested on his strong alibi. He had been at work at the Kwik Pep gas station in Florida on the day of the crime, a fact supported by both his boss Robert Zachery and by Zachery’s boss, who provided time cards and paycheck records.
Detective Wade contradicted Zachery’s testimony, claiming Zachery told him the young men were not at work on the day in question. The jury believed the police officer and the eyewitnesses, and Charles was convicted and sentenced to death.
Exoneration
Charles’s mother was a tireless advocate for her son and continued to call upon Zachery for assistance. Zachery mentioned the communications to his friend, Deputy Sheriff Harvey, who had been patrolling the Kwik Pep station in Florida. Harvey consulted the journal he kept of his daily rounds and discovered notes confirming that both men - Williams and Charles - were at work in Tampa at the time of the murders.
The Savannah District Attorney ordered a reinvestigation of the case in 1978. After confirming Deputy Harvey’s information, prosecutors did not oppose Charles’s motion for a new trial. His conviction was vacated, and all charges against him were dropped. Charles was freed on July 5, 1978, nearly four years after his arrest and incarceration. By the time of the exoneration, the few leads available to authorities had gone cold, and the Rosensteins’ true killers were never caught.
After the trial, Nixon recanted his testimony and admitted that Detective Wade had offered him leniency in exchange for testifying against Charles. Nixon’s recantation was corroborated when Detective Wade’s letter to the Governor and correspondence with Nixon surfaced during discovery in Charles’s civil lawsuit.
Additionally, Nixon revealed to Charles’s lawyers that Detective Wade had supplied him with details of the murder. During the course of the civil trial, Charles’s legal team discovered Detective Wade’s report on his interview with Zachery. In it, he failed to make note of any assertion by Zachery against Charles’s alibi, contradicting his own testimony.
Earl Charles struggled to put his life together in the years following his release, until he walked into the path of an oncoming car and was killed on February 3, 1991.
