FEBRUARY 2021

In Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice, Sydney Powell explains how the prosecution is legally obligated to provide all exculpatory evidence that it uncovers to the defense. After all, the government is the one who handles the investigation and will have access to all the primary information about the crime scene. “The Supreme Court announced this as a constitutional requirement in the 1963 case of Brady v. Maryland, and it has confirmed its underlying principles many times since.”

In his appeal, Doc cited Brady violations. In theory, the government should want its citizens to be exonerated if they are truly innocent. In reality, it doesn’t always work that way.

When talking about Doc’s case and why he had been their number one suspect right from the start, someone in the sheriff’s office had said that because nine times out of ten, it was the spouse. But what if it is actually more accurate to say that nine times out of ten, the spouse will be the one incarcerated for it?

Despite that the evidence was overwhelming that it had been Gardner who put her in the pool, Doc’s defense team didn’t point a finger at the handyman. His testimony was undermined in the defense’s cross examination, but the implication of his lies was never brought out for the jury. They were never given a reason for why Gardner might want to kill Samira. So the prosecutor was able to say to the jury, well, who else would have wanted to kill Samira except for her husband? She pointed to the divorce petition Samira had filed in September 2013, six months before her death in February, and ignored all the evidence that showed that the Frasches were reconciling in the final weeks of Samira’s life.

When Samira and Doc reconciled, Samira shared that some of the people who had testified for her at the hearing where she had been awarded the children and the marital home were now extorting her. Doc asked her to get all the people who had lied under oath for her out of her life, but he would find out later that Gardner was still doing work for her, even as recently as the Tuesday before her death. Instead of it coming out that this would have been the perfect opportunity for him to have stolen one of Samira’s purses and jewelry and other valuables, the prosecutor did a countdown of her own version of the couple’s last two weeks together.

The jury never learned that Doc had asked Samira on more than one occasion to not allow Gardner to work for them anymore. With items disappearing from the garage—such as tool sets and even a car battery—Doc knew there was only person who could have been responsible. 

In that final week of Samira’s life, it is likely that Gardner had started helping himself to Samira’s things as a form of payment for his testimony. Confronting him about the missing items was the one explanation that explained all the facts— Samira’s eagerness to get back to Tallahassee the night before, her insistence that Doc leave early that day with the girls, and how Samira had come to have a blow to her head that had left her unconscious and at the bottom of the pool.

February 22, 2021 was the seventh year anniversary of her death.