Murder case against Hannah Overton dismissed

A Texas judge on Wednesday dismissed the capital murder case against Hannah Overton, ending an eight-year-long legal nightmare for the mother of five.

A jury convicted Overton, 37, in 2007 of murdering her 4-year-old foster son, Andrew Burd, by force-feeding him salt. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned her conviction in September 2014. Nueces County District Attorney Mark Skurka initially said he wanted to retry the case, scheduling another trial for later this year.

But on Wednesday, Skurka filed paperwork to dismiss the case.

“That means we’re done. The case is over,” San Antonio-based lawyer Cynthia Orr told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Orr delivered the news to the family by phone, and she could hear the Overtons’ five children cheering in the background. “Hannah was crying pretty uncontrollable but clearly out of joy and the kids were just really thrilled,” Orr said.

Skurka, who was not the district attorney at the time of Overton’s trial, said he decided to dismiss the case after looking at the facts following the appeals court’s reversal. That review included interviews with key witnesses and consultations with medical experts.

The Criminal Appeals court that overturned Overton’s conviction ruled she did not get effective counsel, largely because her attorneys failed to call a salt-poisoning expert to testify on her behalf. After the trial, the defense admitted to presenting an inadequate case to the jury and failing to pursue appropriate expert witnesses to rebut the testimonies of prosecution-retained medical experts and the local medical examiner, Dr. Ray Fernandaz.

Many in the Christian community in Corpus Christi, a coastal city in South Texas, believed Overton’s arrest and eventual conviction were motivated in part by her faith. The prosecution tried to use her Christianity against her during her trial, showing jurors video of her praying in a police interrogation room. Her actions, Prosecutor Sandra Eastwood said, were not those of someone suffering from a child’s death but those of someone who wanted to get out of trouble. The city’s pastors asked then Texas Gov. Rick Perry to grant Overton clemency.

During the appeals process, Eastwood was accused of lying to the defense and withholding a laboratory analysis of vomit collected from Burd, which showed low sodium levels inconsistent with recent salt ingestion. During a February 2012 evidentiary hearing, Eastwood admitted that at the time of the trial she had been under the influence of both alcohol and prescription diet pills. She was released from the District Attorney’s office in 2010 after admitting she was romantically involved with a known sex offender.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.