BEAUMONT, Texas — The Beaumont man who was sentenced to death in 2017 for the 2010 murder of a Beaumont woman and her 16-year-old daughter is getting a new trial.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the 2017 capital murder conviction of Joseph Colone, Jr., 43, on Wednesday.
Colone's public defenders said in a statement that his 2017 trial was "unfair" because of errors related to forensic evidence.
He was tried before Judge Raquel West in 252nd District Court and found guilty by a jury in the 2010 death of Mary Goodman and her 16-year-old daughter, Brianna at their residence in the 4600 block of Hartel Street in Beaumont's South End.
"These were two witnesses,” District Attorney Bob Wortham said. “They lost their life, because they had the nerve to come forward and tell us what was going on. And who the guy that actually did the robbery and, so he executed our two witnesses."
Prosecutors said in court that Colone killed them at home after Mary Goodman said she witnessed him rob a Beaumont game room.
"This is the worst case that I've seen since I've been DA," Wortham said.
DNA evidence helped the state win their case especially when they found Mary Goodman’s blood inside Colone’s getaway car and on a glove they said he was wearing at the murder scene prosecutors said in 2017.
It took the jury about two hours to make their decision to sentence him to death.
"As my eight years of sending as DA, this was the only case I had approved for a death penalty case because I don't really believe in the death penalty,” Wortham said. “But there are times when it's the only option. And in this case, it was the only option."
During the trial prosecutors said that Cologne's DNA "could not be excluded from a mixture of DNA that was found on a glove and towel at the scene" according to his public defenders.
The glove and the towel were the only pieces of evidence that appeared to place Colone at the crime scene his attorneys now say.
His defenders say that lab notes they found after his conviction showed that the glove and towel were shipped in a cooler along with cuttings from a t-shirt taken from Colone after his arrest 10 days after the murders.
When an analyst at the lab examined the evidence he found that it had been left in the cooler unrefrigerated for more than 30 days according to the lab notes.
During that time cold packs had thawed and the bottom of the cooler was coated with an unidentified "foul-smelling" liquid the lab notes said.
Colone's attorneys argued that the lab notes contradicted trial testimony that the DNA evidence had been properly maintained before the trial.
"DNA experts also said the conditions in the cooler could have compromised the evidence in ways that could neither be conclusively detected nor ruled out," the statement from Colone's defense said.
Now, they're back to square one.
"Everything's starting beginning. We'll have to prove up every fact even the fact that it occurred in Jefferson County. We have to prove up every single fact that is in the indictment," Wortham said.
Colone does not need to be indicted again in the case as he is still facing the original indictment according to Jefferson County Assistant District Attorney Wayln Thompson.
"This has to do with relief being granted because of annotation in the laboratory file that the prosecutors were not aware of," Thompson told 12News on Thursday.
The defense was entitled to see the lab notes as they could have formulated a defense based on them.
"Unfortunately the prosecutors never had the opportunity to see this note," he said.
The case will be placed back on the trial docket Thompson said.
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This is a developing story. We will update with more if and when we receive more confirmed information.