This is the eighth installment in “Exploring Integrity: Reviewing Wrongful Conviction Remedies,” a series examining the impact of conviction integrity units on the American judicial system’s rate of wrongful conviction. Presented by the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism, the investigation is supported by Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Following a critical hearing that spanned more than two months a man who has already spent 15 years in prison for a murder he denies committing is waiting again.
The final day of proceedings that began weeks before Christmas of 2025 was held Monday, to determine if entrepreneur Mario Willis is granted a second chance at exoneration in firefighter Walter Harris’s 2008 death. Harris died after Willis’s handyman Darian Dove set what he called an accidental fire at an east side Detroit house Willis had owned, while Dove entertained a woman there without Willis’s knowledge. Dove later changed his account, saying Detroit Police detectives pressured him into saying he was paid by Willis to set the fire.
In a courtroom filled with family and friends Willis saw the hearing before Third Judicial Court Judge Margaret Van Houten conclude with testimony by the second of two attorneys who previously represented Willis.
“It took a lot longer than the one week we had set aside initially,” Van Houten said at the hearing’s conclusion. The judge cited a busy courtroom docket.
Van Houten didn’t provide a timeline for when she will issue a written opinion about Willis’s petition for a new trial, but said she’ll await briefings from both Willis’s defense team and Wayne County prosecutors in the coming weeks.
Appellate lawyer Elizabeth Jacobs, whose third day of testimony followed several days on the stand by Willis’s trial lawyer Wright Blake, was the last of eight witnesses called to support Willis’s push for exoneration. Jacobs told Willis’s attorney Craig Daly that she previously filed motions on Willis’s behalf through the Michigan Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court, attempting to expose lies told by Dove, who was the prosecution’s key witness in 2010. Statements that were part of Jacobs’s filings also included excerpts read aloud during Monday’s hearing, such as how Dove said he initially told police “several different times” and on “several different occasions” that the fire killing Harris was an accident.
Daly asked Jacobs several questions about whether findings and statements he read to her from the investigation and original proceedings where Willis was convicted met the legal standard that entitled Willis to a new trial; Jacobs said they met the standard.
“I didn’t take him to set no house on fire,” Willis was quoted as telling arson investigator Charles “Chuck” Simms. “I didn’t plan for him to set no house on fire, you know what I’m saying?”
Simms, who has since assumed the Detroit Fire Department’s leadership as its commissioner, was referenced several times throughout the hearing, due to an interview Simms conducted that hadn’t been made available to his defense team in 2010.
Jacobs told Daly that another statement during the Simms interview, in which Willis denied receiving an insurance payment on the house, was exculpatory. Jacobs affirmed to Daly that concealment of the Simms interview likely prejudiced Willis’s jury against him.
In January Wright Blake, Willis’s trial lawyer, admitted to several of what Daly labeled “oversights,” ranging from failure to retain a fire-causation specialist to neglecting to secure a forensic expert who might dispute the ruling of Harris’s death as a homicide. Part of Willis’s claim that he’s entitled to a new trial hinges on the argument that Blake’s representation was ineffective.
Daly also referenced a portion of the Simms interview when Simms confirms a statement of Willis’s whereabouts the night of the fire, contrary to Detroit Police trial testimony that no alibi had been provided.
“You would agree that this passage would have been critical in what [police detective] Shea testified about and what [assistant prosecutor] Stevenson told the jury, correct?” Daly asked.
“Correct,” Blake answered.
Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Jason Williams cross-examined Blake, saying, “Let’s talk a little more about that alibi.”
Williams raised questions about phones belonging to Willis that “pinged” off cellular towers located near the house on East Kirby Street the night of the fire, suggesting that Willis and Dove communicated with each other. Daly objected, saying the history of calls “don’t indicate anything that the prosecution is now saying on the record” because there was no evidence Willis’s multiple business phones were being used in conversation between Willis and Dove.
Since December, Willis’s supporters who attended various portions of the hearing included past and current members of the Detroit Police Commission, the Emergent Justice advocacy group, the Organization of Exonerees, the Detroit Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and local churches, among others.
As at the outset of the hearing in December when Dove testified, his name was repeatedly mentioned at Monday’s conclusion, such as his letter to a judge, alleging that Willis had also hired him to set a fire in 2007. By the time Dove wrote the letter both he and Willis had been charged in Harris’s death.
“He was jealous that Mario Willis was on bond while he was in jail,” Jacobs stated in a court filing that argued Dove’s lack of credibility.
In 2023 the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit reviewed Willis’s case, but denied his request for exoneration.
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