GREENFIELD — The state Supreme Judicial Court has ordered a new trial for the former Greenfield man serving a life sentence for a 1994 murder.

Elvio J. Marrero, 62, had his conviction overturned on Thursday, 28 years after being sent to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Shirley for killing Greenfield resident Pernell R. Kimplin. The Northwestern District Attorney’s Office must now decide whether to retry Marrero.

His attorney, Ira Gant, said he hopes to argue to have his client released on bail if the case goes back to Franklin County Superior Court.

Gant explained the conviction was overturned based on DNA evidence obtained in 2017 or 2018, removing a key piece of evidence the prosecution used to convict Marrero.

“Mr. Marrero is overjoyed that the court saw the value of the DNA evidence and the value it could have had at trial, had it been available,” he said.

Gant works for the Committee for Public Counsel Services and represents Marrero, alongside attorneys from the Boston College Innocence Program.

Laurie Loisel, spokesperson with the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, said it is not yet known if there will be a new trial. She explained District Attorney David Sullivan will meet with his assistant district attorneys to weigh the options. She said a decision is expected next week. The DA’s office had no comment on the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision.

Marrero had appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court in 1998, 2002 and 2011, but his conviction was upheld each of those times. In 2022, Gant was joined by the Innocence Program’s Lauren Jacobs and Charlotte Whitmore in arguing in Franklin County Superior Court in favor a motion to dismiss. This motion, however, was also denied.

Kimplin, who was 26 at the time of his death, was last seen alive in his Greenfield apartment on the evening of Oct. 13, 1994. He was found dead in that apartment three days later. He had been gagged, and his hands and feet were tied with electrical cords and rope. He had been stabbed once in the chest and once in the back and had been beaten on his head, neck, shoulders and back with a wooden board broken from a dresser drawer. The medical examiner opined that the victim died on or about Oct. 14 as a result of the stab wounds.

Defense attorneys have long argued that Marrero was out of the country when the killing occurred.

At the 2022 multi-session motion hearing, Lori Levinson, one of the defense attorneys in 1996, took the stand and testified that she had investigated an alibi defense for Marrero, who claimed to be in the Dominican Republic when Kimplin was killed. She said the defense team’s paralegals worked tirelessly to get American Airlines — the airline Marrero used to fly to the Dominican Republic — to turn over passenger name records and “ran into brick wall after brick wall” before receiving them in the middle of the trial.

The document, Levinson testified, looked like “codes and initials and things,” including the letters “ADA.” Levinson explained her team fruitlessly tried to determine what these letters stood for during the trial, only for Levinson to learn through Gant’s investigation that they were a capitalization of Ada, the first name of the travel agent who took Marrero’s reservation and who also testified via Zoom from her Florida home in 2022.

The document also contained a phone number with a 413 area code, which Levinson said made it unlikely the reservation belonged to another E. Marrero, as the prosecution had suggested in 1996. However, Levinson said, this phone number could not be connected to anyone.

Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or
413-930-4120.