A law enforcement officer and crime scene technician urged a North Carolina federal court Wednesday to free them from a civil lawsuit over allegedly faulty evidence used to secure a murder conviction, arguing that the claims have already been litigated.

Gaston County Police Department Officer Kevin Murphy and Jim Workman, a GCPD crime scene technician, said issues over prejudice in Mark Carver's 2011 jury trial were already hashed out during an evidentiary hearing years later that ultimately led to a vacated conviction. For that reason, Carver can't meet his burden to sustain his current due process constitutional claims against them, the duo said in a brief in support of a motion to dismiss.

Carver sued the pair — alongside the city of Mount Holly, an assistant district attorney and state crime lab employees — in their individual capacities, alleging bad faith failure to investigate; evidence misrepresentation by Workman; and evidence withholding by Murphy. The suit stems from Carter's conviction in March 2011 following a jury trial in state court over the 2008 murder of University of North Carolina student Irina Yarmolenko.

Five years later, Carver sought to overturn his conviction and life sentence and secure a new trial in a motion for appropriate relief, or MAR, alleging the trial violated his rights under the state's constitution.

After a nine-day evidentiary hearing in July 2019 that included testimony from 25 witnesses, the trial court granted Carver's request, citing ineffective assistance of counsel and newly discovered DNA evidence. In 2022, the Gaston County District Attorney dismissed the charges against him.

Within the 2019 ruling, the trial court found that Carver failed to show a Brady violation or that the state misrepresented critical evidence to the jury. In light of that ruling, Carver can't now establish his constitutional claims against the men, as they're barred by collateral estoppel, the pair said.

Workman's alleged misrepresentation of material evidence was already litigated in the MAR proceeding, according to the memo.

Workman collected latent fingerprints from the outside of Yarmolenko's vehicle on the day her body was discovered. Months later, he also swabbed the interior and exterior of the vehicle, the memo says.

In the MAR, Carver said Workman's trial testimony over fingerprints he collected was false, and accused Workman of withholding exculpatory facts from the jury. But the trial court held that he failed to establish that the state misrepresented critical evidence to the jury.

That ruling precludes Carver from establishing elements of his evidence misrepresentation claim against Workman in this lawsuit, the pair said.

The same logic follows for Carver's accusations against Murphy, according to the memo. Carver said in his MAR that Murphy received information from a witness that was never disclosed to Carver before trial, but would have likely changed the verdict, according to the memo.

That information concerned a sighting of a vehicle similar to Yarmolenko's being driven near the crime scene by someone who did not resemble Carver on the day she was murdered.

Carver is now raising the same factual allegations made in the MAR to assert a Brady-based constitutional claim against Murphy, the pair said. However, the trial court already indicated during the MAR proceedings that Carver's allegations regarding this witness not only raised a Brady issue, but found that Carver failed to prove a Brady violation.

In doing so, the trial court determined it was unlikely that Murphy's disclosure of the witness report to the defense would have resulted in a different outcome, they said. As the trial court already concluded during MAR proceedings that Carver couldn't support a Brady claim, he can't meet the bar now to sustain his constitutional claim, the pair said.

Carver's claims against both men of bad faith failure to investigate also fail because the pair's alleged misconduct was already hashed out in the state court's ruling on Carver's MAR, they said. For that reason, Carver can't establish the element of underlying "bad faith" misconduct, the memo says.

"These conclusions defeat his bad faith failure to investigate claim outright because the trial court concluded, as a matter of law, that neither Murphy nor Workman violated plaintiff's constitutional rights in the first place," according to the memo.

The state court also determined as a matter of law that factors related to how Carver's trial attorney handled the DNA evidence were the only causes of prejudice that resulted in his conviction, according to the memo. Carver can't ignore that the trial court concluded that it was neither Murphy's nor Workman's conduct that deprived him of his liberties, according to the memo.

Carver's claims against the pair should also be dismissed because they're both entitled to qualified immunity, and he didn't allege a plausible claim under the Fourteenth Amendment for the misrepresentation or withholding of evidence, they argued.

Even if Workman did withhold evidence, Carver didn't allege that it was done deliberately, that the evidence was material or that the misrepresentation caused the conviction, they said.

Regarding Murphy's alleged withholding, Carver's narrative about the situation hardly provided facts that qualify as exculpatory, the memo says. Carver also did not offer a "naked assertion" that Murphy failed to disclose evidence in bad faith, according to the memo.

Carver sued in early August, accusing the city, its employees and state employees of using faulty evidence to convict him of Yarmolenko's murder. He alleges the investigators used Carver's intellectual disabilities against him. He pointed to a reliance on his testimony after he was subjected to difficult questioning despite police knowing he was intellectually disabled, and incorrectly collected DNA evidence.

Counsel for Carver declined to comment.

Counsel for the other parties did not immediately reply Wednesday to a comment request. 

Carver is represented by Joshua Snow Kendrick of Kendrick & Leonard PC and S. Fredrick Winiker of the Winiker Law Firm PLLC.

The City of Mount Holly and William Terry are represented by Daniel E. Peterson of Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein LLP.

Kristin Meyer and David Crow are represented by Terence Steed and J. Locke Milholland IV, respectively, of the North Carolina Department of Justice.

Murphy and Workman are represented by Christian J. Ferlan of Hall Booth Smith PC.

The case is Carver v. City of Mount Holly et al., case number 6:25-cv-00478, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.

--Editing by Marygrace Anderson.