(October 3, 2008)--Prosecutors and defense attorneys filed documents Thursday seeking for a new trial for death row inmate Michael Toney, claiming the state's lead prosecutor improperly withheld evidence in Toney’s 1999 trial.
Toney was sentenced to death in the killings of three people in the bombing of a mobile home near Lake Worth in 1985.
Both the state and defense agree Toney's trial attorneys weren't given at least 14 pieces of evidence that could have discredited state witnesses or pointed to other suspects.
The state denies it knowingly sponsored misleading testimony and denies Toney is innocent.
It said it agreed with the defense that he was entitled to a new trial.
If the judge supports the attorneys' findings, he will send his recommendation to the Court of Criminal Appeals, which could order a new trial.
Defense attorneys don't expect Toney to be tried again but prosecutors say it is too soon to say.
Angela Blount, 15, her father, Joe Blount, 44, and her cousin, Michael Columbus, 18, were killed on Thanksgiving Day, 1985, when a briefcase with a bomb in it blew up on the porch of their mobile home.
Toney was indicted in December 1997 after allegedly telling another inmate in the Parker County Jail that he was paid $5,000 to put the bomb at the mobile home but put it at the wrong trailer.
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