A Philly man was released from jail after his overturned murder case officially collapsed

A Philadelphia man whose 2010 murder conviction was recently thrown out by a federal judge was released from jail Thursday after prosecutors said they would not seek to retry him.

The decision thrilled relatives of Steven Lazar, 38, who hugged and celebrated in a fifth-floor hallway at the Stout Center for Criminal Justice after his case finally dissolved.

“There are no words,” said Lazar’s brother, Phil. “It’s just unbelievable.”

Shortly after he was released Thurday afternoon, Lazar hugged family and friends who had gathered near the city’s jail, then thanked his attorneys and said he was “overwhelmed.”

Lazar had been convicted of the robbery and bludgeoning death of 79-year-old Dario Gutierrez at Gutierrez’s North Philadelphia home in 2007. But earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Gerald A. McHugh ruled that Lazar deserved a new trial because information about alternative suspects had been improperly withheld from his defense attorneys and because a key piece of evidence against him — his supposed confession — was given after 30 hours in a holding cell, and while Lazar was likely suffering from acute methadone withdrawal.

Assistant District Attorney Michael Garmisa said Thursday that those issues contributed to prosecutors’ belief that the most “fair and just” step was to drop Lazar’s case, rather than retry it. Common Pleas Court Judge Lillian Ransom approved the request.

The decision came just weeks after the District Attorney’s Office took a similar approach with another overturned murder conviction. In that case, 57-year-old Kevin Bowman was freed after Common Pleas Court Judge Scott DiClaudio ruled that the 1989 conviction was irreparably tainted by undisclosed evidence undermining the credibility of a key witness.

District Attorney Larry Krasner’s administration — which has earned a national reputation for its willingness to revisit problematic cases, and which has helped overturn more than 30 murder convictions — declined in court documents to endorse Bowman’s assertion of innocence. But prosecutors decided against putting his decades-old case before a jury again.

Bowman was released in early March, and his lawyer, Zak T. Goldstein, wrote in court documents that Bowman “spent thirty years in custody for a crime he did not commit.”

In an interview, Goldstein added that it was a “blessing and a miracle” that Bowman had finally been set free. Still, he said: “The part that’s really sad to me is he lost 33 years that he doesn’t get back, no matter what. And the number of people in prison that are in a similar situation is just unbelievable.”

Lazar’s relatives were steadfast that he was not only wrongfully convicted but also truly innocent. His brother said the process of trying to prove that in court was difficult and time-consuming, particularly for Lazar, who had become a fixture in the prison’s law library.

“It took so much to come together to make this happen,” Phil Lazar said, standing near attorneys including Jenny Osborne and Jennifer Merrigan.

Garmisa, the assistant district attorney, said in court Thursday that at least one of Gutierrez’s children still believes Lazar is guilty. But Garmisa said relatives told the DA’s Office they were “emotionally traumatized” by the episode and had asked not to be contacted about it again.

Lazar’s case began in January 2007, when Gutierrez, a father of seven, was found dead inside his rowhouse on the 2700 block of North Mascher Street.

About three months later, one of Gutierrez’s daughters found a suitcase behind the house belonging to Lazar, court documents say. The lead detective, David Baker, then brought Lazar in for questioning, the documents say, but Lazar said he’d given the bag to a friend, who then gave it to someone else. Lazar was allowed to leave.

Several months after that, Lazar got into a dispute with his roommate and police were called. The roommate told officers Lazar had mentioned his role in Gutierrez’s murder, court documents say. Lazar was again brought in for questioning, and this time detectives held him there for more than 30 hours.

By the time the interrogation was over, court documents say, Lazar had confessed, telling investigators he’d participated in the robbery and bludgeoning of Gutierrez with a friend named John.

At trial, court documents say, prosecutors relied on that confession, as well as testimony from several other people who said Lazar had mentioned his role in the murder to them. He was convicted of crimes including second-degree murder, earning an automatic life sentence.

But McHugh, the federal judge who overturned Lazar’s conviction this month, cited several issues while explaining his decision.

First, he said, Lazar’s trial lawyer had incorrectly stipulated that Lazar had last taken methadone a month before his interrogation, instead of the day before, preventing jurors from understanding the acute nature of Lazar’s withdrawal symptoms while he was being questioned.

In addition, McHugh wrote, prosecutors had long asserted that Lazar was the only viable suspect, in part because they said two other suspects had been investigated and ruled out. But evidence in the homicide file — which was not disclosed to Lazar’s attorneys until 2021 — showed police had barely looked into those men. To make matters worse, McHugh wrote, prosecutors appeared to have been aware of that “as early as 2012,″ but continued to assert otherwise while defending the conviction for years.

Finally, McHugh said, the lead detective, Baker, had a history of misconduct that also was not disclosed to Lazar’s trial attorneys. The episodes included a 1998 Internal Affairs complaint in which Baker was found to have denied a suspect access to a lawyer, court documents say, as well as Baker’s alleged use of coercive interrogation techniques while building a murder case against Chester Hollman in the 1990s. Hollman was exonerated in 2019.

Phil Lazar said he was grateful the many issues with his brother’s case had finally been heard by the courts. And although it was a momentous day for the family, he said, his brother had simple plans after being released.

“He wants to go home to his mom’s house, shower, and have a cup of coffee,” Phil Lazar said. “We’ll take it from there.”