A former Alabama state trooper awaiting a retrial on a capital murder charge will spend the coming months out of jail rather than behind bars, after a Mobile County judge ruled this week that his defense team had overcome the steep legal presumption against bail in capital cases.
The ruling capped a nearly two-hour hearing that revisited much of the evidence in a case that has already taken more than a dozen unusual turns. A jury convicted George Martin in 2000 in connection with the 1995 death of his wife, and the trial judge at the time overrode the jury’s own sentencing recommendation to impose the death penalty. Years later, the presiding judge threw out that conviction after finding that prosecutors had withheld evidence favorable to the defense, a decision the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the previous December.
This week’s judge set bail at $75,000 for the 57-year-old defendant, who sat quietly through the proceeding, along with conditions requiring electronic monitoring and no contact with prosecution witnesses. His attorney told the court his client would live with a sister and brother-in-law, himself a former state trooper post commander, while awaiting a trial date set for early January.
The case centers on the death of Hammoleketh Martin, whose badly burned body was discovered inside her car along a road in the Tillman’s Corner area in October 1995. A forensic investigator determined she had been burned alive. Investigators focused on her husband after learning he had been experiencing financial strain while steadily increasing his wife’s life insurance coverage, a policy that had grown to $380,000 by the time of her death.
Central to the original prosecution was a witness who told jurors he saw a black man in a trooper’s uniform near the scene the night of the death. The defense argued, and the court ultimately agreed, that prosecutors never disclosed that the same witness had identified a different trooper entirely when shown a photo lineup years earlier, one of thousands of pages of documents the court found were improperly withheld.
The defense also pointed to other disputed evidence, including conflicting testimony over whether remnants of a gas can were found inside the vehicle and an undisclosed police interview describing a small red gas can kept in the car, details the defense says support the theory that the fire was accidental rather than intentional. Prosecutors have maintained that this evidence does not resolve the question of guilt one way or the other and have signaled they intend to proceed toward the new trial.
Defense counsel, who is representing Martin without charge, said the case represents one of the most serious instances of prosecutorial misconduct he has encountered, and that he intends to ask the court to dismiss the charges outright before the case reaches a jury again. He described the toll of nearly a decade and a half of legal proceedings on his client, who he said maintains deep ties to Mobile, where he was born and raised.
The case now heads toward its scheduled trial date, with both sides expected to spend the coming months preparing arguments shaped heavily by the evidence disputes that already unraveled the original conviction.