On October 22, 2007, at 9:50 a.m., a man robbed the Chase Bank branch on West 56th Street on the northside of Indianapolis, Indiana.
He walked quickly past Laurie Russell, a customer, then showed a handgun and ordered everyone to get on the floor. He gave a bag to Keira Kimbrough, a teller, and told her to put money in it. He then demanded that teller Shonda Laverty do the same.
The robber then ran from the building. Police later said he stole between $16,000-$17,000.
Witnesses described the robber as a Black man, 25 to 30 years old, wearing a green and black jacket, a black hoodie or stocking cap, dark jeans, and black gloves. Witnesses told an officer at the scene that the man was between 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 11 inches, with a husky build.
Earlier that morning, at 9:08 a.m., the Chase Bank branch three miles away on Lafayette Road had been robbed.
Police obtained surveillance footage from both robberies and released that footage to the media. On October 30, 2007, Detective Leon Benjamin of the Indianapolis Metro Police Department received a Crime Stoppers tip that 39-year-old John Turner Jr. was the man seen on the surveillance footage from the Lafayette Road robbery.
Turner had three previous robbery convictions. Benjamin created a photo array that included Turner’s photo and showed it to the witnesses at the Chase Bank robbery on West 56th Street. Two of the witnesses identified Turner as the man who robbed the bank. Police issued an arrest warrant for Turner on November 8, 2007, and he was arrested on January 23, 2008, charged with two counts of robbery and two counts of confinement for the robbery on West 56th Street.
Prior to Turner’s trial, Jeffrey Tyson was convicted of the bank robbery on Lafayette Road. Turner was never charged in that crime.
Turner went to trial in Marion County Superior Court in April 2008. He was represented by Travis Fox, a court-appointed attorney. Turner’s first trial ended in a mistrial with a hung jury. At that trial, Russell, who is white, did not identify Turner as the bank robber.
The second trial began in early June 2008.
Both Kimbrough, who is Black, and Laverty, who is white, identified Turner in court as the man who robbed the bank. Each said, “That’s him.”
This time, Russell testified that she got a look at the robber’s face when he entered the bank and brushed past her. She identified Turner as the robber and said that she had been “really terrified” at the first trial. She testified that she had initially told a prosecutor she was only 80 percent sure in her identification, but now felt more sure, 100 percent certain. During cross-examination, Russell said she had testified at the first trial that she hadn’t gotten a sufficient look to identify the robber and wasn’t sure after looking at the photo array. She also said she felt bad after testifying at the first trial, because she thought the robber was Turner.
Benjamin testified about the investigation. He said neither the money nor the dye packs taken by the robber were recovered. Benjamin said that after receiving the Crime Stoppers tip, he put together the photo array that included Turner, because he believed that Turner looked like the person in the video.
Benjamin testified that the general description of the robber was a Black man, 25 to 35 years old, with a medium build, between 5 feet 8 inches and 6 feet tall. At the first trial, he had testified that the robber was described as 5 feet 8 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall, with a medium build.
In a police report, the witnesses described the robber as being 25 to 30 years old, with a husky build. Fox had sought to cross-examine Benjamin about the inconsistency between his testimony and the police report, but the state successfully objected because Fox had not introduced the report, which another officer wrote, into evidence. (At the time of the robbery, Turner was 39 years old, 6 feet 1 inch tall, and between 180 and 185 pounds.)
At the first trial, Turner’s brother, Kevin Turner, identified Turner from the bank video. Kevin Turner didn’t testify at the second trial, and Fox didn’t present evidence from Turner’s mother and sister, who were prepared to testify that John Turner wasn’t the person on the video.
Turner didn’t testify, but Fox submitted photos taken from the bank videos as well as his booking photo and the photo used in the array. In his closing argument, Fox said this was a case of mistaken identity, telling the jury that Turner had different lips, chin, and mouth than the man in the video. The tellers were mistaken, he said, and Russell never really got a good look.
Deputy prosecutor Rodney Cummings told the jury in his closing argument that Fox’s descriptions of the facial differences were not evidence and that the case against Turner was overwhelming.
“Everybody is mistaken?” he asked. “I mean that’s what you have to believe is everybody who testified has to be mistaken. So, we have—let me see; the caller is mistaken. Detective Benjamin is mistaken. All three of those girls are mistaken. All of them? Everybody is mistaken.”
On June 13, 2008, the jury convicted Turner of two counts of robbery and two counts of criminal confinement. He received two 15-year sentences, to run consecutively, for the robbery convictions, concurrent 10-year sentences for the confinement convictions, and a 20-year habitual offender enhancement, for a total of 50 years.
On October 23, 2008, Turner pled guilty to robbery of a bank in Kokomo that occurred on October 19, 2007. He received a four-year sentence to run consecutively with his earlier convictions.
Turner appealed his Indianapolis convictions, arguing that he shouldn’t have been convicted of two counts of robbery, because only the bank had its property taken. On March 9, 2009, the Court of Appeals of Indiana vacated one of the robbery convictions. A judge reduced Turner’s sentence to 35 years in prison.
Turner filed three petitions for post-conviction relief, in 2009, 2013, and 2016. The third petition was amended on February 22, 2024, after attorneys Toby Gill, James Edgar and Scott Newman began representing Turner. Newman served as Marion County’s elected prosecutor from 1995-2003, and Gill and Edgar were deputy prosecutors during that time.
The amended motion said that Fox had provided ineffective representation at Turner’s trial.
According to the motion, Fox had failed to object to continued references by the state that the Crime Stoppers tip was about Turner’s charged crime, not the other bank robbery that led to the conviction of another man. Referring to the state’s closing argument, the motion said, “Cummings made it seem as though the tipster had identified Petitioner as the person who robbed the 56th Street bank and that the jury therefore could not acquit [Turner] without finding that the tipster had been mistaken. In that way, the tipster bolstered the testimony of the eyewitnesses and reduced the importance or necessity of jurors scrutinizing the video and scrutinizing the reliability of the eyewitness identifications.”
The motion also said that Fox failed to adequately cross-examine Benjamin about the specifics of the Crime Stoppers tip, which was about a different bank robbery, “allow[ing] this false connection to mislead the jury.” The state’s use of the Crime Stopper tip in closing arguments, which presented the tipster as another witness against Turner, was improper, the motion said, and Fox should have objected.
In addition, the motion said that Fox erred in not having Turner’s mother and sister testify, not having Turner walk across the courtroom to show that he was taller and slimmer than the man in the video, not introducing the police report that contradicted Benjamin’s description of the robber, and not seeking a mistrial or asking for a continuance after Russell, contrary to her testimony at the first trial, identified Turner with “100 percent certainty” at the second trial.
The motion also said that Fox failed to adequately challenge the eyewitness identifications or present any expert evidence showing that Turner wasn’t the man in the video. The motion said Turner’s legal team was prepared to present “testimony of an expert who, having compared the images of the robber with photographs of Petitioner, has concluded that those two are not the same person.”
At an evidentiary hearing before Magistrate Judge James Snyder, Lora Sims, the director of biometrics at the Ideal Innovations Face Center of Excellence, testified as an expert in facial identification. She compared photos of Turner against photos of the man in the video and said the two men had different nostril tips, different shaped necks, different lips, and different earlobes. Sims said her analysis was limited because the man in the bank robbery wore a wool hat and the video quality was poor. She said that her observations supported “to some extent” that Turner was not the man in the bank video.
Fox testified that he had received the Crime Stoppers tip about the bank robbery on Lafayette Road but did not realize it was a different bank than the one that Turner was charged with robbing.
Fox testified that he opposed Turner’s desire to use expert facial analysis at trial. He said he had not seen any experts qualified to offer an opinion in this area, and he was concerned that a review might be unfavorable and create inculpatory evidence against Turner. Fox said he thought there was sufficient reasonable doubt from the video and still photos alone. “It doesn’t take … an expert to look at that video and to look at John, at [least] as John appeared at the time, and say it’s not him,” Fox said.
On January 9, 2025, Judge Snyder denied Turner’s petition. He said that Sims’s testimony, based on its limited certainty, was not new evidence of innocence, but rather was impeaching evidence and unlikely to have produced a different result at trial.
He also rejected Turner’s claim that Fox was ineffective, ruling that Fox’s decisions not to retain an expert witness or present testimony from Turner’s family members were strategic decisions.
Judge Snyder said that Fox’s failure to clarify which robbery was referred to in the Crime Stoppers tip or to object to its use in the state’s closing argument didn’t prejudice Turner. He said that it appeared all the parties were confused about the contents of the tip, the state’s use of this tip was “minor and isolated,” and there was ample evidence for the jury to convict Turner.
Turner, now also represented by Deputy State Public Defender John Pinnow, appealed, arguing that Judge Snyder erred in ruling that Sims’s testimony would have merely impeached the other witnesses. The appeal also said that Judge Snyder had erred in ruling that the state’s use of the Crime Stoppers tip in its closing argument did not constitute misconduct.
“The prosecutors here had access to the Crime Stoppers tip and knew or should have known the tip related to a different bank robbery than the charged robbery,” the appeal said. “Their closing arguments argued the tip related to the instant robbery and provided the jury with a false narrative about the tip to bolster their argument to convict Turner.”
The appeal also said that Russell had recanted, saying in an affidavit that she felt pressure to identify Turner with 100 percent certainty and that she would not identify Turner if there was a retrial. Russell’s affidavit didn’t say who pressured her or what form the pressure took.
While the appeal was pending, the Indianapolis Star published a lengthy story about Turner’s case. The article noted that the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Marion County Prosecutor’s unit reviewed the case in 2021 but said there was “insufficient evidence” to proceed.
The story, by Kristine Phillips, also detailed Benjamin’s history of alcohol-related misconduct and incidents on-and-off the job. Benjamin had retired in August 2008 after being charged with a felony and five misdemeanors for two separate traffic accidents involving police cars. He died in 2014.
After the story ran, a person contacted Phillips and said the man in the bank video was Derrell Muhammad. Gill obtained a 2008 booking photo of Muhammad and asked Michael Banush, a former detective with the Kokomo Police Department, to review that photo against the bank robbery footage.
“I watched the first video clip and immediately recognized the robbery suspect to be Derrell Muhammad,” Banush said in an affidavit dated September 12, 2025. “It should be noted that I worked multiple bank robberies involving Derrell Muhammad back in 2008, 2014, 2015 and 2016.” (Muhammad couldn’t be charged with this crime because of the five-year statute of limitations.)
Sims produced a second report that compared Muhammad’s booking photo against the video footage and said there was “moderate support” that Muhammad was the bank robber.
Based on this new evidence, Turner’s attorneys moved to return the case to Marion County. The motion said that the 2024 motion “focused on evidence that Turner was not the bank robber—effectively one side of the coin. The new exculpatory evidence focuses on evidence that Derrell Muhammad is actually the bank robber—the other side of the coin.”
The Indiana Court of Appeals granted the motion to remand on September 26, 2025.
Turner then amended his motion for post-conviction relief to include the reports from Banush and Sims.
Judge Marie Kern of Marion Superior Court held an evidentiary hearing on November 24, 2025. On January 12, 2026, she vacated Turner’s convictions related to the bank robbery on October 22, 2007.
Judge Kern said Banush provided credible testimony that was “grounded in personal familiarity rather than speculation.” She also said that Sims’s new report provided “moderate support” that Muhammad was the bank robber.
In addition, Judge Kern credited Russell’s recantation. “The Court considers this recantation cautiously but finds it corroborative of the newly discovered third-party identification evidence rather than standing alone,” Judge Kern wrote.
Turner had been paroled from prison on January 4, 2026.
“Eyewitness identifications are inherently unreliable, especially when the person does not know the person they’re identifying,” Gill told the Star . “This case is a perfect example of how unreliable it is ... This case has shown me that there must be so many people out there that have been convicted that are innocent.”
The state dismissed the charges on January 30, 2026.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 02-26-2026
