In December 2001, twenty-year-old Adrian Gordon was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison. He always maintained his innocence. No physical evidence linked him to the crime. His conviction was based on unreliable testimony provided by a single alleged eyewitness.
RMIC began investigating Mr. Gordon’s case in 2004. Early on, the investigation uncovered critical failures: police never collected the murder weapon – despite it lying inches from the victim’s head – and law enforcement withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense.
What followed was more than two decades of litigation.
In 2009, RMIC filed a petition for post-conviction relief raising claims of destruction of evidence, failure to disclose material information, and ineffective assistance of counsel. Nearly five years later the petition was dismissed.
In 2013, RMIC filed a petition for post-conviction DNA testing. Mr. Gordon was excluded from the evidence that was tested. But the most critical piece of evidence – the uncollected murder weapon- remained unavailable and could not be tested.
Years later in 2019, after eighteen years of persistent records requests and continued investigation, RMIC uncovered that law enforcement had withheld crucial evidence identifying an alternative suspect – one who had been identified as the perpetrator by two independent witnesses immediately after the murder. Law enforcement had filed the reports under separate case numbers not linked to the murder investigation.
In 2020, RMIC filed another post-conviction petition, raising claims of failure to disclose material information, destruction of evidence related to the alternative suspect, and false testimony at trial. The law firms of Mayer Brown LLP and Dorsey & Whitney joined RMIC in litigating the case.
At the same time, RMIC petitioned the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole for redetermination of Mr. Gordon’s sentence, seeking his release on parole while the legal fight continued. In February 2024, after serving twenty-three years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Mr. Gordon was released from Utah State Prison.
While post-conviction proceedings were still pending, RMIC presented Mr. Gordon’s case to the newly formed Salt Lake County Conviction Integrity Unit.
In December 2025, after two decades of RMIC’s advocacy, the Unit petitioned to vacate Mr. Gordon’s conviction. The Unit concluded that the alleged eyewitness identification was unreliable and that law enforcement’s failure to disclose information about the alternative suspect compromised the integrity of Mr. Gordon’s conviction. The Unit found “the circumstantial evidence considered by the judge in finding Mr. Gordon guilty of the crimes with which he was charged does not support the conviction in Mr. Gordon’s case.”
In April 2026, the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office dismissed the murder charge, finally clearing Mr. Gordon’s name.