VENTURA, CA - District Attorney Gregory D. Totten announced today that following review by the conviction integrity unit, his office has agreed that Michael Ray Hanline be released from prison.

On November 10, 1978, J. T. McGarry, aka Mike Mathers, disappeared from his home in Ventura. Two days later, his body was found off Highway 33. Hanline was convicted by a jury of first degree murder with the special circumstance that the crime was committed in the course of a burglary. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Investigations conducted by the District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit and Bureau of Investigation, and by the California Innocence Project, have found new evidence that casts doubt upon the correctness of the jury’s verdict. At the initiative of the District Attorney’s Office, DNA analysis was conducted on evidence collected at the crime scene. In addition, the District Attorney’s Office concluded that certain reports would have been helpful to the defense and should have been disclosed to defense counsel at the time of trial.

On November 13, 2014, the District Attorney filed the attached response to a petition for writ of habeas corpus. In response, the Superior Court, County of Ventura, issued a writ of habeas corpus setting aside the conviction and sentence. The matter is now scheduled November 24, 2014, at 8:30 a.m. in courtroom 13, to set the case for retrial and establish bail.

As the United States Supreme Court recognized in Berger v. United States, the twofold aim of the prosecutor “is that guilt shall not escape nor innocence suffer.” To that end, the District Attorney established a conviction integrity process in 2012 to review claims of factual innocence. At the present time, the conviction integrity process has not concluded that Hanline is factually innocent. But flaws in the trial and the totality of the evidence cast sufficient doubt upon the conviction to warrant vacating the jury’s guilty verdict. The District Attorney will continue to evaluate the evidence to determine how to proceed.