In the end, the jury found both men guilty, and a judge sentenced each to 60 years in prison.
If Pearson were to serve the entire term, he would be 98 upon release.
His co-defendant changes his story
Pearson has made multiple attempts to get his conviction overturned in the years since the jury convicted him on robbery and assault charges.
In one attempt, a state Court of Appeals ruled in his favor before the South Carolina Supreme Court overruled it.
Weldon, meanwhile, secured a new trial in 2022. Instead of going to court, he took a plea deal.
As part of that agreement, he had to — for the first time — submit a full confession for the crime he had denied committing for more than a decade.
In that statement, Weldon said Pearson had nothing to do with the robbery and that he had never met him before the trial in 2012. He reaffirmed that point in June in an affidavit taken by Pearson’s attorneys.
“The others who helped me rob Gibbons were not arrested,” he wrote. “Instead the police arrested Michael Pearson. They claimed they found his fingerprint on the back of the victim’s El Camino. I did not know who Pearson was. He wasn’t involved in the robbery.”
Instead, he named two other men he said joined him in the attack.
One, Pearson said, was the same person implicated in the interview recordings his attorney never entered into evidence.
The Post and Courier is not identifying either man named by Weldon because they have not been charged in relation to the robbery.
The court found Weldon’s statement credible enough to give him the plea deal. He will now be released in November.
According to Pearson’s latest petition for freedom, investigators with the 3rd Circuit Solicitor’s Office and Clarendon County Sheriff’s Office interviewed him multiple times in summer 2023 following his co-defendant’s admission.
During those interviews, Pearson said, the investigators told him Weldon had come clean, casting doubt on his own guilt. Pearson again told them he was not involved in the 2010 robbery, that he never met his codefendant before the trial.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
