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KATHRYN WEXLERMichael Pernell Weston didn't fit the description of the man who robbed a dry cleaners last December.
TAMPA - For nearly eight months, Michael Pernell Weston sat in a Hillsborough County jail for crimes everyone involved in shaping his fate now says he didn't commit.
"I was going to spend my life in prison," said Weston, 39, sitting on the concrete porch in front of his Carrollwood house. His accuser was a clerk at $1.99 Dry Cleaners on Busch Boulevard, a woman robbed at gunpoint and tied up in the bathroom on Dec. 31.
Weston's physique and that of the suspect differed in nearly every regard but race. The case against him lacked evidence. Weston's alibi - that he was at home watching college football - was confirmed by family members and a neighbor.
But the victim picked Weston's picture in a photo lineup. And off to jail he went - disbelieving and insistent that he didn't commit the armed robbery and kidnapping that could lock him up for life.
"It took a lot out of him," said his attorney, Barbara Pittman. "I would go see him at the jail and I could see it. He was depressed."
Assistant State Attorney Mark Stallworth said that once he lost confidence that Weston was his man, he agreed to drop charges on the unusual condition that Weston pass a polygraph test.
Weston passed three. With flying colors.
"I feel very good about the case but (not) for our victim, who has not found out who committed the crime," Stallworth said. "My heart goes out to her, but at the same time, the defendant has rights."
Pittman had harsher words for Weston's predicament.
"The man was locked up for a crime he didn't commit. It's just a travesty," she said.
The mess erupted on Jan. 2, when Weston tried to outrace sheriff's deputies who wanted to pull him over for an expired temporary tag. They punctured his tires to stop him, then arrested him.
Upon questioning, Weston declined a lawyer and told the detective he fled because he thought his license was suspended for not paying a ticket, according to the transcript.
He also said that while on the run, he tossed out an unloaded revolver and homemade mask he had intended to use to intimidate a former colleague but never went through with it.
That didn't sound good to detectives, Stallworth said. And Weston wasn't a stranger to the justice system. Ten years ago, he had served six months' probation for flashing a firearm.
Two days earlier, a man wearing aviator glasses had entered the dry cleaners, stuck a gun in the clerk's face and told her to empty the cash register into a plastic bag. He then ordered her into the bathroom, made her straddle the toilet and bound her hands to the handicap bar.
She would describe the assailant as 5-feet-11, with short hair, a medium complexion and a weight of 190 pounds. She'd only seen his face from the nose down.
It was Weston, she told police, when they showed her his picture next to five others.
He was arrested at his house on a warrant in late January. His wife, Diana, a school aide, badgered his public defender, detectives, anyone who could possibly help. She begged for a lineup or lie-detector tests, but no one was in a rush, she said.
Weston, meanwhile, languished.
"I was always in maximum security, I guess because of the nature of the crimes," said Weston, who worked in the Wonder Bread warehouse in South Tampa until shortly before his arrest.
Exasperated, Mrs. Weston hired Pittman several months after her husband's arrest. Surviving on one salary instead of two, and with their daughter, Michaela, and her premature infant at home, Mrs. Weston filed for bankruptcy in late June to pay the legal bills and save their house of 10 years.
When the victim was deposed on June 23, Stallworth started to have doubts. The victim reiterated that the suspect was two inches taller than she was. She was 5-foot-9.
Weston was 5-foot-7 and weighed 160 pounds on a good day - not 200 pounds as the suspect did. The victim described darker skin tone than Weston, and faddish clothes his family said he didn't own.
The day Weston walked out of jail, inmates in his pod applauded, he said. He cried as he made his way through the jail's long, cold halls.
Weston received time served for the fleeing to elude charge, punishable by five years in prison, Stallworth said.
Pittman, a former prosecutor herself, doesn't blame the State Attorney's Office for not moving faster to help free her client.
"I understand they had to be careful, and before they dropped the charge, they had to make sure," she said.
Weston said it's not anger he feels, but relief. Having once been wrongly accused, he won't be so quick to condemn.
"I won't just judge people anymore," he said.
- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.