Wednesday, September 30, 2026 - A Utah judge has ordered a 71-year-old man to be released on bail after he spent decades on death row for a 1985 killing after prosecutors said newly analyzed DNA evidence did not match him.
Douglas Stewart Carter was sentenced to death that same year
after a jury found him guilty of murd£ring Eva Olesen, an aunt of the Provo
police chief at the time.
The state Supreme Court ordered a new trial last year,
citing misconduct by investigators. Carter has maintained his innocence and
says a signed confession was coerced.
No physical evidence linked him to the crime scene, but the
jury convicted Carter, a Black man, based on the confession and two witnesses
who said he bragged about killing Olesen, who was White.
Defense attorney Neal Hamilton said Carter will be placed in
an extended-stay accommodation near the family of his son, who was adopted by
another family as an infant and didn’t learn about the conviction until years
later. Carter will also need therapy to deal with his extended incarceration,
Hamilton said.
“It’s not just as simple as, ‘Let’s let him go,’” Hamilton
said. “He’s being released with 41 years of state-induced trauma and the effect
it will have on him is very real.”
Judge Derek Pullan had scheduled a two-month retrial for
2027, but last week Utah County prosecutors withdrew a notice that they
intended to seek the death penalty.
The prosecutors said results of a DNA analysis received
September 22 exclude Carter as a possible match to blood found on a doorknob
and genetic material recovered from the handle of a knife used to stab Olesen,
who was also shot.
Utah County prosecutor Erwin Petilos told the judge Monday
that reassessing Carter’s bail was “necessary and fair” as the state continues
to look at the remaining evidence in the case.
Carter, a Chicago native, had been living with his mother in
Utah at the time of Olesen’s killing on February 27, 1985. Court documents
indicate the investigation eventually focused on Carter, who was suspected of
killing Olesen during a robbery.
By that April, Carter had fled Utah believing he was a
suspect in an unrelated assault case, according to court documents. He was
apprehended that June in Nashville, Tennessee, where Carter signed a confession
while under interrogation by a Provo detective.
Carter said later that he had given a false confession after
being repeatedly threatened by police. He was convicted and sentenced to death
after a trial in which the defense called no witnesses. He was again sentenced
to death after a 1992 retrial, and courts in Utah rejected numerous appeals
from Carter in subsequent years.
A turning point came in 2011, when the two witnesses at his
original trial were tracked down in Mexico. They said they had been told to lie
in court and were given cash and gifts by police who told them not to disclose
the payments. They also said police and prosecutors threatened them and their
son with deportation if they did not implicate Carter.
More than a decade of legal wrangling followed before the
Utah Supreme Court last year ordered a new trial, citing “multiple instances of
intentional misconduct” by police and a prosecutor.
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