Last month, the US Supreme Court turned down a vindictive prosecution appeals claim by Justin Wolfe, a Virginia drug dealer currently serving a 41-year murder sentence, without comment. The decision marks the end of a two decade-long legal battle for Wolfe, who was convicted of hiring a hitman to kill his drug supplier, Daniel Petrole, in 2002.
The case exposed a massive drug ring in Virginia and was highly publicized, with Wolfe being only 19 at the time of the crime and put on death row. With only a few days before his execution, Wolfe’s lawyers managed to halt the execution by claiming that “prosecutors withheld evidence and Barber [the hitman] recanted his testimony that he’d been paid by Wolfe to carry out the slaying,” reports the Associated Press.
He was instead given a new trial under new prosecution, where he accepted a plea deal signing a handwritten confession in exchange for forgoing the death penalty and was sentenced to 41 years in prison.
However, the legal battle didn’t stop there. In X Wolfe recanted his admission and appealed on the grounds of vindictive prosecution, claiming that the aggressive charges of the last trial forced him to give a false confession. At the time, the US Supreme Court instructed the Virginia appellate court to review the appeal, but the “state courts declined to do so, finding defense attorneys raised the argument too late in the case” says The Washington Post.
In his last effort to change his sentence, Wolfe returned to the Supreme Court for an appeal, which they finally declined in June 2021 marking the end of the ongoing litigation.
