The final defense witness in Michael Buehner’s retrial for the 2001 murder of Jerry Saunders was Debbie Powell, who described coming home from work in the early hours of May 24, 2001.
She looked out of the bedroom window of her house on Marah Avenue on Cleveland’s East Side and witnessed the murder of Jerry Saunders.
A year later, Buehner would be convicted of Saunders’ murder. Powell never testified about what she saw at that trial and her witness statement to police, uncovered 12 years later, would lead to the reversal of Buehner’s conviction.
Powell finally took the witness stand on July 18, 2023. Buehner’s attorney, Russell Randazzo, asked her to describe the shooter.
“I can’t say how old the guy was but he was a Black guy that shot him,” Powell said.
Buehner is a white man.
“Have you ever seen our client, Michael Buehner, before?” asked Randazzo.
“No.”
“Was he on Marah Avenue on May 24, 2001?”
“No, he wasn’t there. I didn’t see him there, he wasn’t out there,” Powell said.
Powell said she even pointed out to police the person she saw shoot Saunders, but no arrests were made. Her statement to police, where she described seeing a Black shooter, wasn’t turned over to defense attorneys before Buehner’s first trial in 2002.
In addition to Powell’s testimony in the retrial, the prosecution’s case was alarmingly weak. Over the course of the 8-day retrial, the prosecution presented no physical evidence tying Buehner to the crime.
Key pieces of the victim’s clothes were missing or destroyed, making retesting for DNA impossible. No gun was ever found. Michael Buehner’s pickup truck was never checked for fingerprints or other evidence. Police junked another black pickup truck potentially linked to the crime before the first trial. Detectives never spoke to the first witness to reach the scene and administer CPR on Saunders.
The two eyewitnesses who connected Buehner to the crime and testified in the first trial proved later to be unreliable. Both signed affidavits disavowing their testimony in the years between the first and second trials. The prosecution called both back to the stand anyway.
The jury only needed about three hours of deliberation to come back with a not guilty verdict.
After the verdict was read, Buehner said the first thing he’d do is get rid of all the public records he’s collected since his first trial 20 years ago.
“Burn all that paperwork that I had, that I’ve been saving for years and years,” Buehner said after wiping away tears. “All in the rearview mirror.”
It’s remarkably difficult and time-consuming for anyone to get a second shot at a trial. There's no right to legal counsel for post-conviction appeals in Ohio. It is extraordinarily difficult to uncover new evidence from inside prison. And if a defendant manages to, like Buehner did, it takes years of motions, denials, delays, appeals and hearings before a court grants a new trial.
In Buehner’s case, it started with a public records request long after he was convicted. In 2014, a friend received Buehner’s case file from the Cleveland Division of Police. The file included multiple witness statements, including Debbie Powell’s, that were never turned over to Buehner’s defense the first time around.
Even with the new evidence, it took nine more years of appeals, waiting, motions and delays to get to this point.
“Just shocking to believe that today, after all this time, all the new evidence, everything that happened, that they still believe it was me,” Buehner said. “That they still prosecuted me after the last two years of pretrial motions and all the things that we found that would suggest otherwise.”
There was only one person at both trials who said he was absolutely sure he saw Michael Buehner shoot and kill Jerry Saunders.
"Mr. Price, you agree you are a liar?"
Randy Price walked through the door of courtroom 18A in the Justice Center to testify at the end of the first week of the trial. Price is currently being held on federal gun charges in West Virginia, but he appeared in court in orange prison clothing and slippers worn by inmates at the Cuyahoga County Jail, where he'd been temporarily transferred for Buehner's retrial.
Short and stocky, shackles around his ankles and wrists, Price shuffled past the defense table with his head down and did not look in Buehner’s direction.
The 50-year-old Price has spent decades of his life in prison. He got on the witness stand and told pretty much the same story as 22 years ago.
According to Price, he and Buehner were close at the time of the murder. They socialized daily. On the night of May 23, 2001, Buehner and Price headed out in Buehner’s black pickup truck. Price was driving.
“So, what was your impression, where were you going?” asked Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Dan Cleary.
“My impression was the water world,” Price said.
“What’s that mean?”
“A place where you can cop PCP.”
Price said along the way they picked up a Black man whom Buehner knew but who was never introduced to Price. Authorities have never been able to identify that third passenger in the truck.
They made their way to East 93rd and Marah, with Price driving, Buehner in the middle of the truck’s bench seat and the unnamed Black man in the passenger seat.
Once there, Price said they pulled over at the corner and three or four people hopped into the back of the pickup before heading a short distance down Marah.
“As I stop, they jump out the back. A couple go on one side, a couple go on the other side. The Black guy slides out, Mikey slides out,” Price said. “I can’t remember if they say, ‘He’s got a gun,’ or if I heard a gun, but when I looked, I seen fire and then the noise, the fire from the gun.”
Price testified that everyone scattered and Price started to drive off with Buehner in the truck. Price said he saw Saunders fall to the ground as they drove off and Buehner got out of the truck to check his pockets.
“He starts crying hysterically, like, ‘What did I do? What did I do?’” Price said about Buehner as they drove off.
Other testimony from prosecution witnesses contradicted several parts of Price’s story.
Another prosecution witness, Henry Harris, was near the corner of 93rd and Marah that night. He testified for the prosecution that only two men – Jerry Saunders and Lawone Edwards – got in the bed of the truck.
Harris also testified that Saunders was shot while he was still in the bed of the truck; that the gun shots came from inside the truck and he never saw Buehner, or whoever was in the middle seat, get out of the truck. The only one who got out, according to Harris, was the Black man in the passenger seat. Harris said the Black man in the passenger seat was the one who went through Saunders’ pockets after the shooting.
Harris could not identify anyone in the truck, only saying there were two white men and one Black man.
Randy Price testified that the victim, Saunders, was actually coming down a nearby driveway toward the black pickup when he was shot, not in the bed of the truck or near the passenger door. He was the only person to describe what happened that way.
During cross examination, Buehner’s attorney started off with a few “yes” or “no” questions for Price.
“Mr. Price, you agree that you are a liar, correct?”
“Pretty much.”
“Yes?”
“You’ve lied to me, correct?”
“Correct.”
“You’ve lied to the police, correct?”
“Correct.”
It also came out during cross examination that, while Price and Buehner are second cousins, they were not close. Price was 26 years old when they first met. The time between Price’s release from prison in 2000 and Saunders’ murder, which was the only period of time in their lives when the two men would have been able to socialize, was less than a year.
Price testified that he did not know for sure that the two children who lived with Buehner were his kids. He also said that he did not know Buehner’s father’s name.
Lawone Edwards casts doubt on his own testimony
The second key eyewitness for the prosecution who testified was Lawone Edwards. Edwards said he hopped into the back of the pickup truck with Saunders. He was standing nearby when the Black passenger got out and Saunders leaned into the truck and was shot by one of the passengers inside.
Police showed Edwards photo lineups a little more than a month after the murder, and he told them Price and Buehner could have been the two men in the truck that night. Six months later, in December, he would pick Price out of a physical lineup as the driver. In January, the police brought him back for another lineup. Edwards picked out Buehner as the shooter.
But his testimony 20 years later threw doubt onto that identification.
“They just kept coming, keep coming to see me and ask me these questions,” Edwards testified about repeated visits from the police. “Basically, in my younger mind, it’ll be easier if I just tell them what they want to hear and get it over with.”
Edwards testified he picked out Buehner because he knew that’s who the police wanted.
“The police didn’t say, ‘No, pick this guy,’” Edwards testified that it was their response after he said Price and Buehner may have been in the truck that tipped him off.
“So around that time, one of the detectives, he got – I remember where he got up and left. So the second detective was like – we both in the room. He was like, ‘Man, you like be doing good.’ So I’m like, ‘What you mean by that?’ He like, ‘The guys that you leaning more towards, them the guys that we was thinking that did it.’”
One of the detectives in that room that day, Sahir Hasan, testified at Buehner’s retrial that no detective left the room during Edwards’ questioning.
After his not guilty verdict was read at his retrial, Buehner mouthed the words ‘Thank you’ to jurors. He wept and hugged family members who had spent eight long days listening to testimony and waiting for the whole thing to be over.
Buehner said the first thing he was going to do was to dispose of all the police records he’d held onto for years, the records that he knew gave him his last, best chance of getting out of prison.
