It’s been a whirlwind of legal proceedings for Trye Bradbury ever since he was convicted of murder in a 2014 shooting.
Bradbury was 15 at the time and he got involved in a shooting between rival gang members at Coquillard Park that ended up killing 2-year-old John Swoveland who was playing over 1,200 feet away in his front yard.
Bradbury didn’t pull the trigger to kill Swoveland, but prosecutors say he brought the gun that was used and Bradbury was convicted of murder.
Bradbury has been incarcerated since his arrest in 2014 but a slew of new developments — including a state witness who said they lied at Bradbury's original trial and a new plea deal — means the 25-year-old Bradbury has been released from prison.
Plea deal
The simplest explanation for Bradbury being released from jail this week is that he accepted a revision plea deal. Instead of murder, which he was originally convicted of, Bradbury agreed to plead guilty to aiding in aggravated battery and was given a 20-year sentence. Because Bradbury has already spent 10 actual years in prison, he accrued enough credit for good behavior to have officially served his sentence.
But the path to get to the new plea has been anything but straightforward.
Since he was convicted in 2016, Bradbury has explored multiple avenues of having his conviction overturned. In an appeal, he argued his trial attorneys were ineffective for going with an "all or nothing" trial strategy of refusing to to allow jurors to consider a lesser sentence of reckless homicide in the shooting.
The state court of appeals voted 2-1 to overturn the conviction based on those grounds, but the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the original conviction in another divided ruling. Bradbury even attempted to have the U.S. Supreme Court hear the case, but the court didn't take it up.
But attorneys for Bradbury recently brought forward new evidence alleging one of the state’s witnesses lied at Bradbury’s trial. That witness is Terrance Peterson, who testified as a jailhouse informant — meaning Peterson was in jail with Bradbury and originally claimed Bradbury confessed details about the case to him.
Specifically, Bradbury's case hinged on the argument that he wasn't aware that the shooter, Robert Griffin, was going to shoot at the other gang member Larry Bobbit. In the moments before the shooting, Bradbury said he was telling Griffin not to shoot and Bobbit, the one being shot at, backed up Bradbury's account at trial.
However, Peterson told the jury that Bradbury confessed to him in jail that Bobbit was going to lie on the stand, undercutting a key witness for Bradbury. According to Bradbury's attorney John Chenoweth, Peterson's testimony greatly helped the state.
"Terrance Peterson told the jury that Tyre had basically had confessed to him when they were both in the jail," Chenoweth told WVPE in November. "That was so important to the state's case. It took it from thin and circumstantial to fairly solid if you believed what Peterson was saying."
Bradbury's lawyers argued their case before St. Joseph County Judge Elizabeth Hurley in May of last year. At that hearing, Chief Deputy Prosecutor Chris Fronk denied officials made any formal deals with Peterson, but said law enforcement eventually stopped using him as a witness because he would try to pry information out of his fellow inmates, leading to thorny legal issues of whether that information would be usable at trial.
Hurley ruled that based on Peterson's new admissions, Bradbury should get a new trial and overturned his conviction. The St. Joseph County Prosecutor's Office was in the process of appealing Hurley's ruling, but instead the two sides worked out a plea agreement rather than Bradbury trying to go to trial again.
The deal saw Bradbury admit to a lesser charge of aiding and abetting aggravated battery. Though he admitted to a crime, the deal gave him a sentence he already completed and he was released.
Chenoweth did not respond to a message seeking comment on Friday.
In a written statement, the prosecutor's office said it looked at many different factors before reaching the plea deal.
“The parties recognize that …. a myriad of factors were considered, including but not limited to: the age and culpability of the Defendant in 2014, the finality of this resolution, logistical difficulties in securing the attendance of witnesses from over ten years ago, the [judge’s] finding that there was no misconduct on the part of the state or the investigators, the risks of a significantly greater sentence upon a guilty verdict, and the additional time required to resolve the case by a trial," the statement read.
