Federal appeals court upholds overturned conviction in Ada 'Innocent Man' murder case

Afederal appeals court has upheld a decision to overturn the conviction of one of two men in the 1985 kidnapping and murder of an Ada convenience store worker.

Along with co-defendant Tommy Ward, Karl Fontenot was convicted twice in the kidnapping and murder of Donna Denise Haraway from an Ada convenience store in 1984 and sentenced to life without parole. A federal judge in Muskogee overturned Fontenot’s conviction in late 2019. The judge ruled that Fontenot had legitimate claims of innocence and that investigators knew a confession he made but later recanted was of dubious validity.

Fontenot was released from prison in 2019 pending the outcome of the state’s appeal to the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The case gained national attention in 2006 after author John Grisham published The Innocent Man, a nonfiction book that touched on the case in addition to a number of other dubious murder convictions in Ada in the 1980s. Public interest in the case was reignited when the book was adapted into a 2018 Netflix documentary of the same name and that went into further details about the case.

Read more: https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/federal-appeals-court-upholds-overturned-conviction-in-ada-innocent-man-murder-case/