A former assistant district attorney and defense lawyer testified Friday he believed Westmoreland County prosecutors and New Kensington police falsified records and planted evidence a quarter century ago in pursuit of a murder conviction.
“They framed my client because they wanted to put a needle into Denard Galloway’s arm,” testified attorney Tim Geary during a day-long hearing before Common Pleas Court Judge Tim Krieger.
A California nonprofit legal defense team is seeking to overturn Galloway’s first-degree murder conviction and life sentence.
Galloway, now 61, was originally convicted following a 2000 trial in connection to the Feb. 6, 1999 shooting death of 43-year-old Terry Anderson outside of a New Kensington bar. Prosecutors contended Galloway and a still unidentified man killed Anderson in retaliation for being shorted $51 in a drug deal.
A Westmoreland County jury rejected the prosecution’s call for Galloway to be condemned to death following his initial conviction that was overturned in 2003. Galloway was again convicted of first-degree murder following a retrial in 2005 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Galloway has long maintained his innocence.
He is now being represented by lawyers with the San Francisco University-based nonprofit, the Racial Justice Clinic. The organization contends a former Westmoreland County assistant district attorney and two New Kensington police officers framed another man with drug offenses to leverage him into testifying against Galloway in the murder trial.
Geary represented Tim Brown, who along with a roommate lived in an upstairs apartment in the same building as Galloway. They were arrested and charged with drug offenses in 1999. Prosecutors at the time claimed a confidential informant, at the direction of New Kensington detectives, purchased drugs from Brown as a pretext to search his home and find evidence used as a basis to support the criminal charges against him.
Geary now claims the case against Brown was manufactured.
Geary has lived and worked for the last 20 years in Wisconsin, spent two years as an assistant district attorney in Westmoreland County before moving in private practice. He was appointed by a county judge to represent Brown in the 1999 drug case.
He testified for more than six hours on Friday and is among the more than a dozen witnesses subpoenaed to testify in Galloway’s appeal, a list that includes former prosecutors, court personnel, law enforcement and judges.
“They had a blood lust to get Denard Galloway,” Geary said of now retired assistant District Attorney Larry Koenig and former New Kensington detectives Ron Zellers and Frank Link. Koenig retired in 2018. Link, a former city police chief, is also retired. Zellers, who also served as New Kensington police chief, died in 2012.
Geary testified he now believes the prosecutors and then detectives falsified statements in court documents to obtain a search warrant of Brown’s home. During that search, Geary contends detectives planted drugs as part of a conspiracy to force Brown and his roommate to testify against Galloway.
Brown refused to cooperate with prosecutors. His drug trial in 2000 ended in a mistrial and he eventually pleaded no contest to avoid further jail time, Geary said. Brown was charged by Pennsylvania State Police in another drug case two years later. Geary contends that prosecution was pushed by New Kensington police as Galloway was awaiting his murder retrial.
Brown in 2005 testified as Galloway’s alibi at the murder retrial.
During a hearing last summer, Galloway’s new lawyer, Laura Bazelon, suggested the tactics used by Koenig and the New Kensington detectives were indicative of a pattern of misconduct that local court officials long suspected but never acted upon.
She repeated those claims on Friday.
“All of the charges against (Geary’s) client were fabricated,” Bazelon said.
Westmoreland County District Attorney Nicole Ziccarelli, who took office in 2022, has not commented on the allegations.
During Friday’s hearing, Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Ranger strongly denied the allegations raised by Galloway’s lawyers.
“There is no grand conspiracy to get these people. It doesn’t exist,” Ranger said.
Krieger is being asked to determine whether Galloway’s appeal was timely filed before he can consider the veracity of the defense’s prosecutorial misconduct allegations.
Galloway’s appeal hearing will resume with three additional days of testimony beginning on June 10.