Keith Sylvester, a Black man from Atlanta, spent more than a year in jail for the murder of his mother and stepfather – despite video and cellphone evidence proving his innocence that was deliberately withheld by the detective investigating the murders.
Now, Sylvester is poised to receive a $1.5 million settlement following a decision by an appellate court to reverse the conviction, according to WSB-TV.
However, it does not appear as if the cop investigating the case, Atlanta Police Detective James Barnett, was ever disciplined for withholding evidence that would have proved Sylvester never murdered his parents nor set fire to their house after strangling them.
Nor does it appear that he will be charged with perjury, which would be the appropriate charge in a case like this.
“The argument goes, a jury could find that Detective Barnett either intentionally lied to the state judge or was so reckless with the truth that he misled the state judge into thinking there was probable cause,” according to the appellate court ruling that reversed his conviction.
Atlanta police ended up arresting another Black man, Cornelius Muckle, for the murder of Deborah and Harry Hubbard after cellphone records determined his phone was inside their home before they were murdered and their house set on fire. Muckle, who had no connection to the Hubbards, also tried to sell items stolen from the home to a local pawn shop two days after the murders.
But Barnett claimed Sylvester murdered his parents to collect insurance money. However, Sylvester’s attorney at the time said he was not even listed as a beneficiary, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“The insurance policy doesn’t name him anywhere,” said
Zack Greenamyre at the time. “And he would be one of six children and stepchildren that would be beneficiaries of the policy.”
Sylvester, who had spent almost six months helping detectives in the case in the hopes of finding the murderer, said he was shocked when he ended up arrested.
“When (the detective) presented me with a citation and told me that I was under arrest for the murder of my parents, I thought it was a trick for him to try to get more information,” Sylvester told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a May 2024 article.
“I was thinking that this was a mistake. They were going to realize something, and I was going to be out of there pretty soon. I was thinking I was going to get out within a couple of days.”
Instead, he ended up spending 14 months behind bars on murder, arson and insurance fraud charges.
The Murder
It was June 2, 2018, and Sylvester was visiting his mother and stepfather at their Atlanta home, which is something he did on an almost daily basis, according to WBS-TV.
But he left the home before 9 p.m., according to evidence from his dash camera, cellphone carrier and security cameras that recorded him at gambling establishments, according to the court ruling.
Telephone records also determined that Harry Hubbard called his niece, Nyaira Walton, at 9:30 p.m. She told detectives that her uncle revealed no signs of distress during the call.
At 3:56 a.m., the Atlanta Fire Department received a call about a house fire, and when they arrived at the scene, they discovered the bodies inside with signs of strangulation.
Firefighters also determined the fire was deliberately set “shortly before” the call came in, which would have made it impossible for Sylvester to set it, according to the above-mentioned evidence that was never introduced in the trial. An autopsy also determined that the couple was still alive when the fire started because there was ash and soot in the couple’s tracheas, indicating they were still breathing when the fire started.
However, it appears as if Barnett was not having much luck finding the real killer, so he focused his efforts on Sylvester.
According to the appellate ruling:
“The majority of Detective Barnett’s investigatory work occurred in the first few weeks after the fire. Over the next four months, the flow of information slowed. Eventually, Detective Barnett determined that he had gathered as much evidence as he possibly could and decided to seek an arrest warrant charging his sole suspect, Keith Sylvester—the son of Deborah and stepson of Harry.”
It was almost six months after the murders that Barnett arrested Sylvester in December 2018, to his shock, since he had been working tirelessly with police to help solve the crime.
Here is how Sylvester described the arrest to WGRZ in February 2019 after he was incarcerated for two months:
“I had been working with the Atlanta Police lead investigator, James Barnett. I had been giving him as much information as possible to help him find out exactly what happened or to have possible leads. All I know is, is he called me on the 28 of December. I was at work, and he was telling me he wanted me to come in the next day for a final interview. He said it was the end of the year and he just wanted to recap or see if I had additional information. I said well if it’s that important I can come in tonight, he said no, just come in tomorrow. So on that Saturday, I went into police headquarters about 5 o’clock when he asked, and basically he asked if I had any more information for him, and I told him I didn’t know anything else, and then he said, ‘That’s unfortunate for you,’ and then he charged me with their two murders.”
Barnett spent the next year trying to prove his innocence by writing letters to judges, prosecutors and civil rights organizations in the hopes they would review his case.
The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office opened an investigation and determined the real murderer was Muckle.
However, prosecutors tried to lay the blame on Google for jailing the wrong man, accusing the tech company of taking nine months to respond to a request for a geofence search warrant, which would have allowed investigators to “cast a wide net by collecting information about all devices that were within a specified area,” according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
That is how they determined the Muckle’s phone had been inside the Hubbard home shortly before the fire broke out, and they were murdered, according to 11 Alive news. That is also how they determined Muckle tried to sell items stolen from the home two days later at a local pawn shop.
“The result of this investigation shows that an assailant, who was unnamed in the original police investigation, was, in fact, in the house of Deborah and Harry Hubbard 20 minutes before a 911 call was placed regarding the fire that caused their deaths,” District Attorney Paul Howard said in a statement to 11Alive News at the time.
