2024 August 26 NEWS ARTICLE WGLT – Lawyers are appealing a McLean County judge’s denial of new trial in Barton McNeil case
WGLT | By Lyndsay Jones
Published August 26, 2024 at 2:38 PM CDT
Lawyers working on behalf of Barton McNeil have filed an appeal in the Fourth District Appellate Court seeking to reverse a February trial court ruling that denied McNeil’s request for a new trial.
Judge William Yoder ruled in February that new evidence in the 26-year-old murder case would likely be inadmissible at a second trial and denied a petition to bring the case before a new jury.
McNeil, 65, was convicted in 1998 of suffocating his 3-year-old daughter during an overnight stay at his apartment in Bloomington. Lawyers with the Illinois Innocence Project have argued that forensic evidence and affidavits developed since that conviction support McNeil’s innocence claim.
Most recently, that included assertions from two women who say they were told McNeil’s former girlfriend, Misook Nowlin, confessed to killing the child.
The two women who testified in November 2023 about the alleged confession are Nowlin’s daughter, Michelle Spencer, and Dawn Nowlin, who is married to Nowlin’s first husband, Andy Nowlin. The confession was allegedly made by Don Wang, Misook Nowlin’s husband at the time Linda Tyda was murdered. Tyda was Nowlin’s mother-in-law and Nowlin was later convicted of her murder in 2012.
While Yoder acknowledged the women’s statements “do constitute newly discovered evidence… the testimony would almost certainly not be admissible at a retrial as the defendant would first have to call Don Wang to testify that Misook Nowlin never confessed to him and then call Michelle Spencer and Dawn Nowlin to attempt to impeach Don Wang’s testimony,” he wrote in February. “Such testimony by Don Wang would not damage the defendant’s case but would not fail to support its theory.”
Yoder concluded the testimony of the two women “is not conclusive evidence, that considered along with the other trial evidence, would probably lead to a different result at a retrial.”
McNeil’s lawyers have appealed Yoder’s ruling and are still seeking a new trial, but they’re also asking the appellate court to consider ordering a new post-conviction hearing so that all new evidence can be presented to the trial court. That evidence was barred from being presented during a November 2023 evidentiary hearing.
McNeil has been imprisoned following a conviction in 1999. The four-day bench trial that ended with a sentence of 99 years in prison did not include testimony or evidence of Nowlin as a possible suspect.
Edith Brady-Lunny contributed reporting.
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