Irishwoman Julie Marku hopes that testimony from a DNA specialist, will convince an appeal court in Crete on December 4 that the forensics report used to sentence her husband Mark Marku for armed robbery is unreliable and misleading.
Julie Markou has been campaigning for two years to have her husband released from a Cretan prison where he was jailed following a conviction for armed robbery.
Mark Marku was convicted to 18 years in prison in January 2012.
However his wife Julie Marku, and her parents, Bill and Phyl O’Reilly, believe his trial was a miscarriage of justice, not least because Mark – who is an Albanian citizen – was in Ireland when three of the seven armed robberies he was convicted for took place.
Even though he was able to provide alibis, flight records and affidavits that could prove this, these were disregarded by the prosecution as forgeries and dismissed by the judge, they claim.
According to the Greek daily Eleftherotypia the prosecution failed to provide any evidence for 11 of the 16 charges brought against him. Mr Marku’s Athens-based lawyer, Leonidas Pegiadis, who spoke to the newspaper stated that his was “a trial of purpose, to restore faith in the police and the courts”.
The Irish Innocence Project has come to the side of Julie Marku, in assisting the Greek lawyer of her husband, and is sending to Greece Dr Greg Hampikian, a DNA expert from the Idaho Innocence Project, who will testify at the trial on how his conviction was based on unreliable and misleading evidence that does not prove Mark Marku was involved in the armed robberies.
The Innocence Network was founded in 1992 and uses DNA evidence to examine cases where there are claims of wrongful conviction. Since it began, over 300 people have been exonerated only in the USA.
Julie and Mark Marku met in Crete in 2007 when Julie was travelling around Greece for the summer. They fell in love and lived and worked in Greece for two years, then they were married in Ireland in April 2009.

Source: enetenglish