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The Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed a post-conviction court’s decision granting a new trial for a man accused of murdering a woman in Bartholomew County back in 1997.
The appellate court concluded that certain evidence suppressed by the State of Indiana, which included information about an alternative suspect in the case, could’ve changed the outcome of Hubbell’s conviction, according to court documents.
“As a result of the State’s suppression of the exculpatory evidence, we must conclude that our confidence in Hubbell’s conviction has been undermined,” Judge Paul Mathias wrote in the Sept. 1 opinion.
In the late 1990s, Jason Hubbell was sentenced to 75 years in prison for the murder of Sharon Myers.
Myers, who had just returned to work from maternity leave, disappeared in May 1997 from the parking lot of the Arvin Industries Gladstone plant in Columbus. Her shoes were found in the lot and witnesses reported seeing a six-foot-tall blond man and a white cargo van parked near Myers shortly before her disappearance.
Her body was found six months later, and she had been strangled to death with her own clothing, according to court documents.
In September 1997, another woman, Kelly Eckart, disappeared near her home in Franklin. Her body was found later that month, about two miles from where Myers’s body would eventually be discovered. Eckart also was strangled to death with her own clothing, according to court documents. Her shoes had been removed and were found nearby.
In 2000, a jury convicted Michael Dean Overstreet, a 6-foot-tall blond man, of the rape and murder of Eckart. At the time, Hubbell had already been tried and convicted in Myers’s death.
Hubbell was convicted on several pieces of evidence, including an eyewitness account from a woman who said she saw Myers leave Arvin’s parking lot in a white van with a 6-foot-tall blond man. Hubbell, however, had brown hair.
Other pieces of evidence the state used to try Hubbell included testimony from an inmate who said Hubbell admitted to the murder. That inmate’s mother would testify that her son’s account was secured only after the prosecutor paid him, according to court documents.
The state also argued that acrylic fibers and two species of grass near Myers’s body were found in and around Hubbell’s van.
Hubbell was convicted and sentenced for Myers’s murder.
His case then went through several appeals before making its way to the appellate court in 2023 in a post-conviction relief filing.
Following an evidentiary hearing, the post-conviction court entered an 83-page order that found, in part, that the state violated Hubbell’s constitutional rights by suppressing material exculpatory evidence, court documents state. Much of the evidence suppressed showed a possibility of an alternative suspect in Myers’s murder, which Hubbell didn’t know about, according to court documents.
The state appealed the post-conviction court’s judgment granting Hubbell a new trial on the single issue of whether the state violated Hubbell’s constitutional right to that exculpatory evidence.
The Court of Appeals affirmed the post-conviction court’s ruling, concluding that the state violated Hubbell’s constitutional rights by suppressing evidence regarding Eckart’s murder. According to court documents, Hubbell’s trial counsel requested that the Bartholomew County prosecutor produce all witness statements and other materials, but his counsel never received materials related to Overstreet or Eckart’s murder.
The appellate court concluded that, had this evidence not been suppressed, the outcome of Hubbell’s trial could have been different.
The case is State of Indiana v. Jason Hubbell, 25A-PC-2477.
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