Douglas Stewart Carter walked out of the Utah County jail on Monday evening, 41 years after he was sentenced to death for a murder he says he did not commit. He is 71. He left wearing a GPS monitor, bound for an extended-stay hotel near the family of a son he has barely known — a son adopted by another family as an infant, who learned of the conviction only years later.
Judge Derek Pullan ordered Carter released on bail over the objections of the victim’s family, after Utah County prosecutors conceded that reassessing his bail was, in prosecutor Erwin Petilos’s word, ‘necessary and fair.’ Last week the same prosecutors withdrew their notice of intent to seek the death penalty again. The reason is a DNA analysis, received September 22, that excludes Carter as a match to blood found on a doorknob and genetic material on the handle of the knife used to stab Eva Olesen, who was also shot, in her Provo home on February 27, 1985.
Olesen was the aunt of Provo’s police chief at the time. No physical evidence ever linked Carter — a Black man, then living in Utah with his mother — to the scene. What convicted him was a confession he signed in Nashville that June, under interrogation by a Provo detective, and two witnesses who testified he had bragged about killing Olesen, who was white. Carter says police threatened him repeatedly until he confessed to something he did not do. His first trial featured no defense witnesses. He was sentenced to death in 1985, and again after a 1992 retrial, and Utah’s courts rejected appeal after appeal.
The case began to come apart in 2011, when investigators tracked the two key witnesses down in Mexico. Both recanted. They said police had told them to lie, had paid them in cash and gifts on the condition the payments stay secret, and had threatened them and their son with deportation if they refused to implicate Carter. Fourteen more years of legal wrangling followed before the Utah Supreme Court, last year, ordered a new trial, citing what it called ‘multiple instances of intentional misconduct’ by police and a prosecutor. The DNA testing that has now excluded Carter was ordered in response to that ruling. The retrial, scheduled as a two-month affair in 2027, may or may not happen; Carter’s lawyers are urging prosecutors to drop the aggravated murder charge entirely.
Carter’s attorneys say the misconduct went beyond buying testimony. According to court documents, witnesses saw a white man fleeing the scene, and an investigator suppressed evidence pointing to other suspects — among them the victim’s husband, Orla Olesen. Prosecutors were close to charging the husband, the defense alleges, until a Provo police lieutenant asked them to hold off so he could keep investigating. Carter was identified as a suspect soon after. Orla Olesen, a painting contractor who told police he found his wife partially undressed with her hands tied behind her back, died in 2009 without ever being charged.
Pullan allowed that the DNA results further undermine the case, though he said a reasonable jury could still convict. Carter must avoid all contact with the Olesen family while he awaits trial. Prosecutors declined Monday to say whether they are now running the DNA against databases in search of another match.
The family of Eva Olesen opposed the release, and said so plainly in court. ‘By golly we were hoping for a concrete match,’ Theresa Olesen, a daughter-in-law, said of the DNA analysis. ‘It doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.’ She added: ‘We just want justice for Eva. And if he had any part of it we want that to be known.’ Four decades after the crime, they have neither a certainty nor a conviction, and their loss deserves better than what the state of Utah has given them, which is forty-one years of confidence and then a shrug.
As for Carter, his attorney Neal Hamilton asked people to understand what Monday’s release actually is. ‘It’s not just as simple as, “Let’s let him go,”’ Hamilton said. ‘He’s being released with 41 years of state-induced trauma and the effect it will have on him is very real.’ Hamilton also noted what would have happened had the state moved faster: ‘If the state of Utah had their way he would have been executed 15, 20 years ago before we discovered the misconduct.’
The criminal justice system sells itself on finality — verdicts, sentences, closure. Douglas Carter’s case is what finality looks like from the inside: not an ending, but a long postponement of the question the evidence was never able to answer.