Prosecutors in western New York have dropped their efforts to retry James Pugh, whose murder conviction in the 1993 killing of a woman near Buffalo was overturned, effectively ending the case against him. The decision came as jury selection was set to begin on Tuesday, with prosecutors admitting they could no longer meet the burden of proof due to the unavailability of critical witnesses and evidence deemed inadmissible more than 30 years later.
Pugh, now 63, served 26 years in prison for the death of Deborah Meindl, a 33-year-old nursing student and mother of two who was stabbed dozens of times and strangled in her Tonawanda home. He was paroled in 2019, and a judge ordered a new trial in 2023 after new DNA testing failed to find his genetic material at the scene, including on the murder weapon. The judge also ruled that prosecutors had withheld evidence favourable to the defence.
Lisa Meindl Payne, Deborah's daughter, who was seven at the time of the killing, hugged Pugh in court on Tuesday and said she continues to seek justice for her mother. Acknowledging the lack of evidence, she told the judge: “The justice system has failed my mother. I have only ever asked for the truth. I have believed in the justice system, but I have lost faith in it.”
Pugh, who now works as a painter and contractor, expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome. “Like Lisa said, there’s no justice here for her or for me,” he said in a statement. “We both just want the truth, and it’s the prosecutors’ job to get it for us. They failed. They failed Lisa. They failed me. They failed Lisa’s sister. Most of all they failed Deborah Meindl.”
The case against co-defendant Brian Scott Lorenz continues, with a second retrial scheduled for April after a mistrial in October. Lorenz initially confessed to the murder and implicated Pugh, but later recanted, claiming the confession was false. A 2021 review by the district attorney’s office suggested that the real killer might be Richard Matt, a convicted murderer who escaped from prison in 2015 and was later shot dead by police.
