recanted testimony
ALTUS - The man who was the prime suspect in the November 2004 shooting death of a District III Drug Task Force informant, and who faced the death penalty in that murder, has been sentenced to a stay in prison as an accessory after the fact.
Mark Adam Prentice, 31, was charged with first degree murder in the death of 34-year-old James Petty, who was found dead on the morning of Nov. 12 that year off the road near an intersection of South County Road 203 and East County Road 166, the victim of multiple gunshot wounds.
District Attorney John Wampler explained this morning that the murder case against Petty was based largely on the testimony of Diana Garcia, of Olustee, who had been jailed as a material witness in the case and who had made a video tape in the past two or three weeks recanting everything she had told law enforcement officials about Prentice's involvement with the murder.
“I'm not pleased or happy with the agreement that was worked out, because I know that Mark Prentice is a very dangerous and evil person,” Wampler said, adding that his office had to go with what it had in the case.
The plea agreement with Prentice and his attorneys from the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System resulted in a 25-year sentence in the state Department of Corrections with all but 10 years suspended, and with time served since his arrest in the case on Dec. 15, 2004. It is to run concurrently with a five year term resulting from a revocation of suspended sentence he'd received for a shooting with intent to injure charge in December 1998.
Wampler said he anticipates that Prentice will do four to five years total on the charges.
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