Motion filed in Mark Carver case to vacate conviction, get new trial

GASTON COUNTY, NC (WBTV) - More than five years after Mark Carver's first degree murder conviction, his lawyer filed a motion Thursday looking to get that conviction vacated and have a new trial.

Carver and his cousin, Neal Cassada, were convicted for the 2008 murder of Ira Yarmolenko. She was a college student found strangled along the banks of the Catawba River in Gaston County. The cousins said they were fishing nearby.

Cassada died of a heart attack before the trial, but Carver has been serving a life sentence. His lawyer, Chris Mumma, said he is innocent.

"We filed a motion that basically disproved all three pieces of that evidence," Mumma said.

In the motion, Mumma states none of Carver's DNA was found on Yarmolenko's body, just on the outside of her car. She also states investigators were able to manipulate his answers during interviews because of his lack of intelligence.

In a previous interview about this case, Gaston County District Attorney Locke Bell said, "I have no doubts whatsoever. There's several thousand hours of looking at every single person, and everything kept coming back to them."

On Friday, when asked for comment on the motion, all he said over the phone was, "We'll deal with it in the courtroom."

Mumma also states in the motion that Carver's 6th, 8th and 14th Amendment rights were violated during the 2011 trial. Those amendments have to do with legal rights in a legal setting.

"It meets the constitutional standards for ineffective assistance of counsel. There was no defense expert put on, there was no defense experts or witnesses put on at all," Mumma said.

WBTV also reached out to Yarmolenko's brother over the phone. He did not want to comment because this was the first he had heard of the motion.

Mumma says the next step will be to wait and see if the judge determines there will be a hearing on this motion.

Copyright 2016 WBTV. All rights reserved.