Grand jury to begin inquiry of Jacksonville prosecutor
By Associated Press
Published October 29, 2003
JACKSONVILLE - A grand jury is to begin an investigation Thursday into whether a special prosecutor knowingly used faulty scientific evidence to help convict a former medical examiner of murdering his wife.
The 1st District Court of Appeal in February reversed the first-degree murder conviction of Dr. William Sybers, 70, for the 1991 death of his first wife, Kay, 52, at their Panama City Beach home.
State Attorney Harry Shorstein of Jacksonville, the special prosecutor, allowed Sybers to avoid a new trial by pleading guilty to manslaughter. Sybers, who took the deal but still maintains he is innocent, was sentenced to time served of about two years and freed.
The Tallahassee appellate court ruled that a laboratory procedure used by the prosecution had not been properly verified. In July, an FBI chemist wrote Shorstein to report that further testing showed the procedure was based on faulty science.
Sybers told the Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville he thinks Shorstein knew long before July that the procedure was invalid.
"When Mr. Shorstein was talking to the appellate court, he knew the FBI was looking into the fact that this was junk science," Sybers said from his home in British Columbia.
Shorstein said Sybers and his lawyers have offered no evidence to support their claim. He said he and two expert witnesses have offered to testify before the grand jury.
A Pensacola jury in 2001 convicted Sybers after Shorstein argued that he killed Kay Sybers with a lethal injection of a drug commonly used to relax muscles during surgery. The now-discredited procedure had been used to detect the drug in tissue from Mrs. Sybers' disinterred body.
