The defense attorney for a man already granted a new trial argued Tuesday that a Deputy District Attorney mismanaged the case so badly that it constituted prosecutorial misconduct — so severe, he said, that his client shouldn’t even be retried for a 2022 murder of a coworker in Scott Township.

“Yes, we got a retrial, but this is so much bigger — it’s become so much bigger,” said Ryan Harrison James, a defense attorney who works on ethics- and civil rights-related cases.

Zairye Simmons, 27, had already been granted a new trial months earlier based on the way Deputy District Attorney Jarrod Caruso mishandled evidence in the case — essentially by failing to present any evidence to support ancillary charges against Simmons: carrying a firearm without a license and receiving stolen property.

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