Help Ian Schweitzer After Wrongful Conviction

After spending 24 years in prison, nearly half his life, Albert Ian Schweitzer is exonerated. Ian was twenty years old when he was wrongly convicted for a crime he did not commit. On January 24, 2023, following a lengthy legal process, Judge Kubota ordered that Ian be "released from his shackles immediately," and he walked out of the courtroom that day into the arms of his family and friends as a free man.

For his release, Ian credits God for answering his prayers and thanks the Hawaii Innocence Project and the Innocence Project of New York for their tireless efforts to prove his innocence.

Please donate today to help Ian establish his life and provide for his basic needs and living expenses.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1991, a young woman named Dana Ireland was struck by a vehicle while she was riding a bicycle down a red cinder road on the island of Hawai'i. A woman found Dana Ireland laying miles away in the bushes of a fishing trail in Wa'a Wa'a, battered and clinging to life, and called the police. Dana was incoherent, partially clothed, and believed she was the victim of a sexual assault. Responders waited an hour and a half before emergency services arrived and Dana was taken to Hilo Hospital, where she tragically passed away.

In the years following the murder, the Ireland family was active publicly and politically to put pressure on authorities to get the case solved. The Schweitzer brothers were indicted in October of 1997; however, the charges were dismissed without prejudice a year later when DNA testing definitively excluded Ian and Shawn Schweitzer as contributors to the unknown male DNA left on Dana’s body. Despite the lack of DNA evidence, the Schweitzer brothers were re-indicted in May of 1999 and Ian was convicted of Dana’s murder, kidnapping and rape. His brother, Shawn, received guilty verdicts in the two preceding trials, plead guilty and received credit for time served.

Eventually, in 2017, additional DNA testing was done. In 2019, with the hopes of freeing Ian, the Hawaii Innocent Project ("HIP"), along with the Innocence Project in New York, entered into a joint re-investigation agreement with the Hawai'i County Prosecuting Attorney's office; agreeing to share information on the case and assist in identifying the unknown male whose DNA was on all the crime scene evidence tested. Shawn also met with Hawai'i County Prosecutors in 2022 to take a polygraph and recant his prior confession, stating that he and Ian were innocent and had not been involved in the murder of Dana Ireland in any way.

On January 23, 2023, attorneys from both the Hawaii and New York Innocence Projects filed a Joint Stipulated Facts with the Hawai'i County Prosecuting Attorney's Office; in which the parties did not dispute the newly discovered DNA, bitemark, or recantation evidence and did not dispute the newly presented tire tread evidence. On January 23, 2023, they filed a new Rule 40 Petition seeking to vacate Ian's conviction and release him from custody.

At an evidentiary hearing on January 24, 2023, before Honorable Judge Kubota of the Third Circuit Court in Hilo, HIP and IP attorneys presented this newly discovered and presented evidence. Following this hearing, Judge Kubota found that this evidence would likely produce an acquittal of Ian's charges at a retrial. Consequently, on January 24, 2023, Judge Kubota ordered that Ian's conviction be vacated and that he be immediately released from custody. Judge Kubota also dismissed Ian's indictment without prejudice.