More than three decades after James Pugh cried out in a courtroom that he was innocent, prosecutors in Erie County finally, on Tuesday, quit trying to prove otherwise.
Mr. Pugh, 63, was convicted in 1994 of the savage murder of Deborah Meindl, a woman with two young children who was discovered beaten, stabbed and strangled in her home in Tonawanda, N.Y., on a cold day in February 1993.
Mr. Pugh always said he had been the victim of a false accusation by a onetime associate and co-defendant, Brian Scott Lorenz, and of a profoundly flawed prosecution. Nevertheless, both men were quickly found guilty and received life sentences; Mr. Pugh served more than 25 years before being paroled, all the while repeating his claims of a frame-up.
After his conviction was overturned two years ago, prosecutors said they would try him again, an effort they abandoned Tuesday at a hearing in an Erie County court.
“What they done to me I can’t change,” Mr. Pugh, a gaunt and soft-spoken figure, said outside the courtroom after a judge granted a dismissal of all charges against him. “They’ve been blaming the wrong person for 30-something years.”
Indeed, there was no physical evidence or eyewitness linking Mr. Pugh or Mr. Lorenz to the murder in Tonawanda, a blue-collar Buffalo suburb; they were convicted largely on the secondhand testimony of often unsavory figures, some of whom later recanted or suggested their accounts had been coerced by the police. Mr. Lorenz implicated Mr. Pugh; both men were petty thieves, and prosecutors argued that Ms. Meindl had been killed during a botched burglary.
In 2023, a State Supreme Court justice, Paul B. Wojtaszek, set aside their convictions, noting that none of the genetic material taken from the crime scene matched the men’s and that prosecutors had not revealed certain evidence to the defense.
Still, the Erie County district attorney, Michael J. Keane, continued to pursue the cases, despite setbacks and past concerns raised by members of his office; in October, a mistrial was declared in a second trial of Mr. Lorenz after a jury failed to reach a verdict.
On Tuesday, Mr. Keane’s subordinates admitted in court that they could not make a case against Mr. Pugh. Ryan Flaherty, a prosecutor, wrote in a motion that there was too little evidence and that crucial witnesses could not appear.
Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, a lawyer for Mr. Pugh, said in court that those reasons were a mere fig leaf.
“The reason the people are moving to dismiss is not because they can’t find or present their witnesses,” he said. “It’s because their witnesses lied in 1994 at the trial and they made decisions that denied Mr. Pugh a fair trial.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Pugh had seemingly gained an unlikely ally: Ms. Meindl’s only surviving daughter, Lisa Payne, who was 7 at the time of the killing. The government, in its motion, cited her desire to see the prosecution end.
“I have spent the last 32 years of my life reliving that tragic day,” Ms. Payne told the court. “I don’t have to close my eyes to see the horrific image of her laying on the dining room floor covered in her own blood.”
“I understand that by asking the court for this consideration that I may never have peace, closure or justice for my mother’s murder,” she said, adding, “Please allow her death to mean something, and at the very least be an example to show the world that our justice system does not always provide justice.”
Ms. Meindl’s murder was shocking in its violence and randomness.
A 33-year-old nursing student, Ms. Meindl came home on normal afternoon in 1993 and never left. Her body was found by her older daughter, Jessica, then 10.
Ms. Meindl’s hands had been cuffed behind her back and her body stabbed nearly a dozen times, and she had been strangled with her husband’s necktie. The crime scene was curious, bearing both signs of a furious struggle — broken glass and overturned chairs — and perhaps of precise planning: A window screen at the back of the house had been cut out from the inside.
Initial suspicions fell on Ms. Meindl’s husband, Donald Meindl, who had mentioned to a friend that he wanted to have his wife murdered and was, at the time of her killing, having sex with a 16-year-old girl he worked with at a Taco Bell. Mr. Meindl, who died in 2023, later said he was joking about killing his wife.
After the proceeding Tuesday, Mr. Pugh said that he should never have been a suspect.
“I’m not capable,” Mr. Pugh said. “I mean, I’ve done a lot of things, a lot of bad things, but I’ve never been violent toward anyone.”
He and Ms. Payne shared a lengthy embrace in the gallery.
“Her opinion is all I really care about,” Mr. Pugh said. “I could care less about anyone else’s. I just want her to be at peace.”
Despite Mr. Pugh’s successful bid for exoneration, Mr. Lorenz is still in jail and faces another trial — his third for Ms. Meindl’s murder — next year.
Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering politics, pop culture, lifestyle and the confluence of all three.
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