TALLAHASSEE, FL. (WTXL) - Friday an appeals court ordered a new trial for a man convicted of trafficking hydrocodone. A three-judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal reversed the conviction and sentence of Gary Kenyon in a Washington County case. It's due to an arrest earlier this year of a former Florida Department of Law Enforcement chemist.
The two-page ruling said, a witness in the case was an FDLE analyst who testified about the nature and quantity of the drugs involved. After Kenyon was convicted, he filed an appeal based on "newly discovered evidence" that the FDLE analyst had been arrested and faced multiple charges, including grand theft of a controlled substance, trafficking in illegal substances and tampering or fabricating physical evidence, according to Friday's ruling.
The appeals court did not identify the analyst, but FDLE spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger confirmed that Kenyon's case was processed by Joseph Graves, a chemist whose arrest earlier this year touched off a wide-ranging review of cases he had handled in various parts of Florida.
