Motion to Appeal
Motion to Appeal
Why this petition matters

Innocent man wrongly convicted for first degree murder
Hello , My name is Matthew Garland and I was wrongly convicted of first degree murder . I didn't have a prior juvenile record or felonies as an adult . The conviction I am speaking on was a murder that happen to be on camera then later was discovered that there was no clear description of the shooter and all that was seen was a black male with a red ball cap. Then upon further investigation, the prosecutor compared the piece of evidence to a video that was recorded a week before the murder at a gas station on the other side of town of me with a similar red ball cap. The red hat that was left on the scene had been tested for DNA thru forensic and more the 6 peoples DNA was in or on the hat and they still finessed a way to use that finding against me. A witness on the scene said he seen everything, gave a brief description of the shooting and the shooter had a lot of similarities to the actual video so the police put my photo in the line up and the witness picked a completely different person. My portion of reality was that my mother and I left boarded the MegaBus a day before the the murder had transpired. My mother had purchased three bus tickets 2 weeks in advanced and one ticket was to come to Minnesota and then other two tickets was for me to ride back to Chicago with her. In trial they put my mom on the stand and questioned her her on how we got to the bus station? Which way did we come into the bus station? My mother answer the question and said we didn't go in the bus station we rode up the bus ramp where cars can't go only the bus can, but we were late so we drove up the bus ramp to catch the bus. The prosecutor became upset at the fact that they didn't ask my mom that question in their initial interview. They had a lack of defense that supported their case because even after I spoke my truth, they did not view the footage of the bus station until I was in the middle of trial. The judge had a meeting with both sides and his conclusion was that it should be a mistrial but he ended up letting the trial go forth. Police backtracked to look at the cameras of the bus station and seen a car coming up the ramp and two people getting out the car but says they seen a third party come to the car and get in after two people had walked away from the car. Neither me or my legal team had seen this video and the video was not presented in trial because it wasn't brought forth in the pretrial motions. The investigator got on the stand and spoke about a video that was NEVER viewed by me or the court. While in my pretrial I had a motion discovery hearing where my lawyers and the prosecutor agreed on a decent amount of motions which the judge granted them but out of all the motions the judge granted two of them were #1: stated they will not bring phone records in to trial because the phone wasn't in my name and they didn't know if I was the one using the phone. #2: stated they wouldn't use any of the Facebook messages on my page because on it shows other people using my profile to message and conversate with other people so they couldn't prove with out a doubt who was on my Facebook at the time. In the middle of trial the judge let the prosecutor bring both phone records and Facebook messages into play. All that was granted and denied was placed on record. I believe I deserve a second chance at trial to clear my name