Mark Carver sues Mount Holly, others he says wrongfully imprisoned him
A Gaston County man who spent nearly a decade in prison for a murder he did not commit is suing some of the people who helped lock him up.
Mark Carver alleged in an Aug. 8 complaint in federal court that the city of Mount Holly, prosecutors and police “deprived (him) of his liberty without due process, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
Carver is physically disabled and has an IQ somewhere in the 60s or 70s. Still, police accused him of murdering UNC Charlotte student Irina Yarmolenko in 2008, and the Gaston County District Attorney’s office convinced a jury to convict him of that charge in 2011.
As The Charlotte Observer reported in a 2016 series, the story never added up. The North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence helped prove him innocent in 2019.
Now that he is exonerated, Carver’s suit is wide-reaching.
Many parties to blame, suit says
The lawsuit targets police, State Bureau of Investigation agents, state crime lab employees and a crime scene technician.
Two forensic analysts “intentionally or with reckless disregard for (Carver’s) constitutional rights misrepresented DNA evidence against (Carver)” when they worked at the SBI’s crime lab in Raleigh, according to the lawsuit.
One of the analysts has died, so Carver is suing the executor of her estate.
The lawsuit claims that an investigator with the Mount Holly Police Department and an SBI agent arrested Carver without probable cause and continued to help with his prosecution, among other things.
A former Gaston County assistant district attorney is “specifically being sued for his role in investigating this matter,” it says. The then-prosecutor conducted an “experiment” to see if sound could travel between the crime scene and the nearby spot Carver had been fishing that day.
An officer at the Gaston County Police Department received an exculpatory statement — but never disclosed it, according to the suit. A detective at the department “misrepresented fingerprint evidence by failing to disclose or properly investigate exculpatory fingerprint evidence,” it said.
Unrelated to the suit, Carver asked the state for a pardon of innocence in 2022.
His petition for that pardon still has not been answered, North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence Executive Director Chris Mumma said.
Ryan Oehrli covers criminal justice in the Charlotte region for The Charlotte Observer. His work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The Observer maintains full editorial control of its journalism.