The Indiana Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of an East Chicago man on Nov. 4 after his defense attorney never saw the re-recording of security video from the man’s cellphone. detective.
Anthony Cobb, 32, could benefit from a new trial.
In September 2023, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for burglary and attempted arson for allegedly breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s Gary apartment in March 2021 and setting the stove on fire while she was away.
During the investigation, a security supervisor at Methodist Hospitals accidentally sent 9,000 photos of the security footage on a thumb drive to the Gary police detective. JerVean Gates. The case was handed over to the defense a week before the trial began.
During the two-day trial in September 2023, prosecutors said three times that the video footage was missing, that is, purged from the hospital system.
“Your Honor, this is the state’s best evidence,” a prosecutor told Judge Salvador Vasquez. “There is no video.”
Vasquez accepted the explanation and allowed assistant prosecutors Jacqueline Altpeter and Keith Anderson to use five still images, as well as the security supervisor’s testimony about what he saw and extracted from the images.
Court records say the 12 minutes of video showed a car in the alley, then a “light,” meaning a fire inside the apartment.
But, as the state’s final witness, Det. Gates said he saved a copy on his cell phone from a monitor, but it was too large to transfer. He showed the images to the victim at the police station, who identified Cobb in them.
Vasquez erred in allowing the five photos and testimony when a cellphone recording of the original footage still existed, which was the best evidence, appeals judge Dana Kenworthy wrote in a 3-0 opinion .
“(Defense attorney John Cantrell) never saw the video – before or during the trial,” Kenworthy wrote.
“This seriously limited his ability to effectively cross-examine witnesses,” she wrote. “It also significantly restricted his ability to make informed objections to the admission of secondary evidence. It makes no difference that the State provided the defense with a full set of photos during further questioning. Not only was there little evidence of how the system produced the photos, but the State provided the 9,006 photos only a week before trial, even though the case had been pending for more than two years .
This was “significantly detrimental” to Cobb’s case, she wrote.
“The photos and video testimony combined constituted the ‘compelling evidence’ that placed Cobb physically at the scene on the night of the burglary,” the appeals judge wrote. “The erroneous admission of the evidence was not a trivial error. And because this evidence was so damaging to Cobb, we consider his erroneous admission to constitute reversible error.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office can appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court, or the case would be sent back to possibly be retried in Lake County.
Online filings do not indicate a future court date.
Prison records show Cobb is serving a 5-year sentence for a gun case from 2021. His earliest release date is May 2026.
mcolias@post-trib.com
