Stephen Joiner was a young patrol officer at the Largo Police Department when he got a call about an attempted sexual battery.

It was the summer of 1989, and a couple reported that someone broke into their triplex on Audubon Drive and tried to rape the woman.

Armed with a film camera and a forensic kit, the 26-year-old Joiner started processing the scene. He took photos of the couple’s apartment and lifted six viable fingerprints, including a bloody handprint from the sliding glass door where the assailant tried to leave after stabbing the woman’s boyfriend twice.

Besides the couple, Joiner and another officer were the only two witnesses called to testify at the trial. He told a jury in the old Clearwater courthouse that none of the fingerprints he lifted matched the defendant.

Thirty-six years later, the retiree was surprised to hear that the man was convicted and even more surprised to hear he received a life sentence.

“If the fingerprints didn’t match him, how in the world did he get convicted?” Joiner told the Tampa Bay Times.

It’s a question that has baffled dozens of people who have looked at Kevin Herrick’s case in the 3½ decades he’s been incarcerated.

Now, a defense team is filing a motion for post-conviction relief, arguing that the state violated Herrick’s constitutional right to a fair trial by withholding evidence that pointed to another suspect.

The motion introduces new evidence gathered by his defense team and asks for Herrick to be released and given a new trial. A judge can either grant a hearing on the motion or throw it out.

On Thursday night, Herrick’s attorneys asked Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney Bruce Bartlett to sign onto the motion to avoid a lengthy legal battle. Bartlett told the Times on Friday he needs more time to review the hundreds of pages of court records and previous appeals before making a comment.

“It’s a lot to digest,” he said. “It’s going to take months to go through.”

The victim told the Times she still believes it was Herrick who attacked her.

“There’s no new evidence that I’m aware of, and I’m really upset by the whole thing because we saw his face, we know it was him,” she said. “This happened to me almost 37 years ago, and now I’m having to think about it all over again.”

Herrick, now 59, rejected a plea deal in 1990 because he said he was certain he wouldn’t be convicted. He’s maintained his innocence since that July night.

“I actually thought there was no way you could be convicted of something you didn’t do,” Herrick told the Times by phone from Florida State Prison. “In America, you’re not supposed to be able to be wrongfully convicted; the system isn’t supposed to work like that. Sadly, it does.”

An attack and an arrest

Police reports, depositions and trial testimony all paint a different picture of what happened on July 15, 1989.

What is clear is that someone tried to rape a 21-year-old woman in her apartment.

The woman — whom the Times is not naming because she is a victim of an attempted sexual assault — lived with her boyfriend and their newborn in the left unit of the triplex. The landlady and her adult son lived in the middle unit, and another young couple lived to the right.

Herrick grew up down the street from the landlady, Theresa Porrey, and her son, Patrick. He reconnected with Patrick Porrey in 1989 and moved in with them while he was looking for a job.

In the weeks leading up to that night, Herrick and Patrick Porrey spent time with the couple. They had a barbecue, played chess and watched a movie with the woman a day before the attack.

On July 14, Herrick came over to play chess with the boyfriend, whom the Times is not naming because doing so could reveal the victim’s identity. The boyfriend wasn’t home, so Herrick played a game with the woman. He left when the boyfriend returned, and the couple went to a movie.

At 11:30 p.m., the boyfriend told the woman he had to leave to help their other neighbor care for a dying fish, according to the trial transcript. The woman put the baby to bed and went to her room for the night.

“I woke up. I don’t know how long I had been sleeping, and there’s this guy over me and it was dark,” she told jurors at Herrick’s trial in 1990. “I couldn’t see anything except for like an image over me. He had his knees on either side of me and a knife to my neck.”

He tried to force himself into her mouth and threatened to kill the baby, according to her testimony.

Then her boyfriend came into the room and started yelling. The two men fought while the assailant was holding the knife, she said. Her boyfriend chased the assailant into the hallway and, sometime during the tussle, was stabbed twice.

The sliding door was locked, and the boyfriend told the assailant to leave through the front door — but not before the attacker left a handprint.

The boyfriend testified that a neighbor’s light shining into the kitchen helped him recognize the assailant as Herrick. He said the assailant’s hair was slicked back with oil. The victim, however, described his hair as dark, poofy and curly.

He said he chased the assailant down the block and behind another building.

“There was a back fence and I thought he might have jumped the fence at the time. So, I jumped the fence and on the other side of the fence is an apartment complex and I saw a car with the engine running,” he said at trial. “I thought at that time that he might have gotten into the car, so I crouched down between some boats and memorized the license plate number.”

When he ran home, he told the other neighbor to call the police with the plate number, he said.

But a couple of minutes later, he saw Herrick come out of the Porreys’ apartment. He said he didn’t tell police he believed Herrick was the assailant because he “wanted to kill him.”

“When, however, the police arrived and you were aware that they were being given a real, honest-to-goodness tag number for a real live car, you knew you were sending the police on a wild goose chase, didn’t you?” the defense attorney asked him.

“Yes, sir, I did,” the boyfriend replied.

In recorded testimony presented at the trial, Theresa Porrey said there was no way Herrick could have left their apartment without her knowing.

The sliding door in his room was jammed off its rails and blocked by construction supplies, she said. She was on the couch watching TV all night, where she was in view of the two other exits.

“When I went in there (to Herrick’s room), that boy was asleep,” she said. “There was no time for that boy to come in there, to hop in bed by the time I got from here to that bedroom. I would have seen him get in the bed.”

The victim told the Times that she remembered thinking her attacker “was the guy next door.”

“I couldn’t believe it was him because he was nice to me, he was quiet,” she said.

When her boyfriend came back, he asked whether she had seen who the attacker was.

“When I said it looked like Kevin, he said it was,” she said.

At 4 a.m., the boyfriend called police from the hospital and told them he was sure the attacker was Herrick.

Police returned to the triplex and arrested Herrick.

Lab results don’t point to Herrick

In a November 1989 deposition, one of the responding officers told attorneys that Patrick Porrey “was very upset by the entire incident.”

“Mr. Herrick was asked to step outside of the apartment for questioning. As he stepped out, Patrick Porrey attempted to come through the doorway,” Officer Thomas Nilsson told attorneys.

Porrey told officers to look under his mattress because Herrick had been sleeping in his bed. That’s where officers found a revolver and a small folding knife. Porrey said the weapons did not belong to him, according to the deposition.

Officers arrested Porrey that night on an outstanding warrant for a misdemeanor charge of underage drinking, Nilsson said.

Porrey was not called as a witness at trial and was not deposed.

During a deposition in December 1989, attorneys asked the victim if her belief that Herrick was the attacker was based solely on her boyfriend’s word.

“Now it is not,” she said.

She told attorneys it was because “they found the blood on his knife and the fingerprints of him on our doors.”

A lab report returned the following month from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, however, said that the folding knife and clothes in Herrick’s room “failed to demonstrate the presence of blood stains.”

Another report from the lab said no hairs like Herrick’s were found in samples from the victim’s sheets.

On May 23, 1990, Joiner, the evidence technician, submitted the results of his fingerprint analysis.

“The six partial latent prints were not similar to the known fingerprints of Kevin Herrick,” he wrote.

A few weeks later, another officer submitted a report that said there were only “four latent prints on file,” and they were determined to be from the left index, middle, ring and thumb of the boyfriend.

The victim told the Times she didn’t know prosecutors didn’t have forensic evidence until right before the trial.

“Even though it was a shocker, we both thought it was him,” she said. “And when we found out the prosecutors didn’t have the evidence they thought they had, I was scared to death he wasn’t going to be put away.”

Report raises questions

When present-day investigators for Herrick’s defense team requested Herrick’s file from the state attorney’s office, they discovered what they thought could be a crack in the case.

Tucked between documents was a half-page criminal mischief report from the Largo Police Department with a redacted case number. It was dated Aug. 8, 1989 — 24 days after the attack.

“I received a phone call from the park manager,” Officer Brian LaVigne wrote. “She had seen the suspect vehicle enter the park and obtained the tag number for the vehicle. Be advised I am going to try to find the owner of this vehicle and interview him.”

Though details are scarce and it is not clear what exactly the officer is referring to, Herrick’s attorneys felt it meant something that the report was included in Herrick’s file.

With the help of the Florida Highway Patrol, they matched the tag number to Paul Fredette, a registered sex offender who was living at Westgate Mobile Home Park at the time — about three minutes away.

Allison Miller, Herrick’s defense attorney, emailed the state attorney’s office in August 2025 to see whether the unspecified case was related to Herrick’s.

Assistant State Attorney Sara Macks responded that the case number was “subject to redaction because it was connected to a sexual assault case.” Whether it was connected to Herrick’s case, she didn’t say.

Investigators tracked down a neighbor of Fredette’s niece, whom he lived with before he died, and collected a pocketknife he was said to have often carried. The motion suggests that fingerprints from Fredette’s items could be tested against prints from the crime scene.

Joiner reviewed the criminal mischief filing and told the Times it did not appear to be connected to Herrick’s case. LaVigne was often called to trailer parks in the area, he said, and the report sounded like a follow-up to a hit-and-run.

Still, Joiner said, it was odd.

LaVigne, the lead officer on Herrick’s case, later worked at the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office before he was killed by a fleeing suspect during a pursuit in 2021.

Joiner said he remembers LaVigne as a “by-the-book cop” who would meticulously record details that might prove important down the line.

If the car or the license plate were not mentioned in LaVigne’s report from the night of the incident, Joiner said, then police must not have been told about it.

“Why wasn’t that conveyed to the police department? There’s no mention of it whatsoever, and why is that?” Joiner said. “It almost sounds like fairytale stuff, but I don’t know why they would make that stuff up.”

Whether the report is related to Herrick’s case, it “raises a flag for sure,” he said.

“And that’s what a trial is all about, casting reasonable doubt.”

“I need more”

Steven Berger doesn’t remember much about Herrick’s two-day trial in 1990, but he remembers the defense attorney didn’t impress him.

When he and the other five jurors went to deliberate, it took only a couple of hours to reach a guilty verdict.

Berger said they didn’t feel the defense gave them enough reasonable doubt, and they were reluctant to believe the eyewitnesses were wrong. As the foreperson, he said he tried to challenge the consensus but ended up voting guilty with the rest of the jurors.

From time to time, he thinks about the case and it “haunts him a little,” he told the Times.

“Part of me is glad that he’s sought better counsel,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘I need more,’ and it wasn’t there.”

Herrick’s lawyer was Ed Leinster, an Orlando-based defense attorney who was disbarred and jailed after his seventh DUI arrest in 1999. In that case, he served five years in prison for a drunken-driving crash that sent a woman to the hospital for weeks.

Five years before he represented Herrick, Leinster was arrested for possession of cocaine. He was suspended from practicing law for 91 days and agreed to go to rehab.

Leinster told Herrick he couldn’t testify at trial because prosecutors could bring up his criminal record.

When Herrick was a teenager, he stole two of his dad’s guns, and he and a friend shot up an empty car. Herrick said it was in retaliation for the owner wrecking another friend’s car. His parents let prosecutors charge him with burglary and grand theft as a lesson.

He was sentenced to two years of probation, which he violated by sneaking out of his parents’ house. He then spent two years in jail.

After he was released in 1989, Herrick aimed to turn his life around. He worked at his sister’s tile company in Chicago before returning to Largo and running into Porrey, who invited him to stay with him and his mother.

Herrick told the Times he didn’t care if his criminal record was brought up. He maintained he didn’t hurt the woman or her boyfriend.

“It was very much like watching a TV program,” Herrick said about the trial. “I did not feel included at all. Nobody included me, Ed (Leinster) certainly didn’t. He pretty much said to sit there and be quiet.”

Herrick filed a motion for post-conviction relief in 1993, arguing his lawyer had been ineffective, but it was denied. He tried again in 1994 and 1996, to no avail.

In 2006, the Innocence Project helped him submit a motion for post-conviction DNA testing. That, too, was denied.

Miller’s motion is the first that includes new evidence and argues Brady violations, which occur when prosecutors withhold evidence that could affect the outcome of a trial.

Miller alleges the first Brady violation was “failing to disclose a report that likely identifies the true perpetrator of the crime,” according to the motion.

The second alleged violation is that the state allowed a false statement of fact to be told to jurors: that “all of the fingerprints lifted and identified” belonged to the boyfriend.

Joiner testified that four of six prints matched the boyfriend.

The final violation the defense alleges is that the boyfriend was an unreliable witness, and his testimony should have been excluded.

The boyfriend had a lengthy criminal history of selling cocaine and marijuana, court records show. Herrick’s attorneys said his punishments “fell well below the Pinellas County norm,” and they believe it’s possible he was “cutting deals” with the police and state attorney’s office.

The attorneys allege that if the boyfriend’s criminal history had been provided to the defense, it could have cast reasonable doubt on the prosecution’s case.

Under sentencing guidelines, Herrick would have faced up to 30 years in prison. But because he had three prior convictions as a “youthful offender,” a judge instead ordered him to spend life in prison.

He was convicted on his 24th birthday.

“Hard to get your hopes up”

Three years ago, Scott Cupp stepped down from his position as a county judge in Hendry County because he was deeply invested in proving a man’s innocence.

That man was Leo Schofield, convicted of killing his 18-year-old wife in 1987.

Schofield served 36 years in prison before being released on parole in 2024 with the help of Cupp’s defense. Although his conviction was not overturned, his attorneys hope the man who confessed to the murder will eventually be charged.

Schofield’s case was the subject of the “Bone Valley” podcast and ongoing Times coverage.

As soon as Schofield walked out of the Everglades Correctional Institution, he was already begging Cupp to help with his best friend’s case, Cupp said. That friend was Herrick, his cellmate of 30 years.

Cupp told the Times he was reluctant to look into Herrick’s case because he thought it was impossible for both men to be innocent.

After reviewing the case and trial transcript, however, Cupp said he was “quickly convinced” of Herrick’s innocence.

“Whoever did this was unsophisticated. There was no mask, there were no gloves — it was pretty chaotic. He’s in this enclosed space; somebody gets sliced, and they bleed,” Cupp said. “There’s absolutely no physical evidence, and there should be. There should have been something that would tie directly to Kevin if he, in fact, did it.”

Cupp is not sure how the motion — which he co-authored — will be received.

“All that I’m sure about is that Kevin didn’t do it,” he said.

Schofield and Herrick co-founded a prison ministry band called The Watchers in 2014 and led worship services at Hardee Correctional Institution for nearly a decade.

“There are not very many people you can relate to in prison when you’re there for something you didn’t do,” Schofield said. “You can just tell when people are different, you can tell when somebody’s trouble or not.”

It took years for him and Herrick to confide in one another about their cases. Eventually, they helped each other author motions and learn more about the legal system.

“Hope is a very interesting word,” Schofield said. “We’ve been down this road so many times, and it’s really hard to get your hopes up. Until now, it seemed like no one was listening.”

For the victim, the possibility of Herrick’s case being revisited scares her.

“If it goes to trial, I’m going to be horrified,” she said. “It’s going to bring a lot of anxiety back.”

Herrick, meanwhile, said he has reconnected with his faith.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in Christian ministry from a program at Hardee and was transferred to Florida State Prison in August to serve as a field minister. He said he speaks to around 100 men three times a week between cell doors.

“I look at the people who are involved in my case, and I’m absolutely amazed that these people are here,” he said. “I’ll attribute it to God’s grace and mercy and His sovereign plan of my life.”