DURHAM -- Defense attorneys for Michael Peterson are questioning the handling of evidence in his case.
Peterson faces a retrial for the 2001 murder of his wife Kathleen. In 2011, a Durham county judge overturned his guilty verdict after a SBI investigator was accused of perjury. Peterson was freed on bond, after serving nearly a decade behind bars, but is still charged with first degree murder.
In a motion filed last week, his attorneys asked a judge to look into the mishandling and storage of evidence from that first trial.
"The defense attorney is doing the job that he's supposed to do and that's to find out what's going on," says Donald Beskind, professor at Duke University.
Attorneys said after reviewing the evidence, they found that documents, from an unrelated criminal case, were mixed up with Peterson's. Beskind says that may not matter if there's a re-trial.
However, attorneys also said that bags containing biological evidence were ripped open. Beskind says that could make the evidence inadmissible.
"Evidence that is testable might have been contaminated so that any testing that would be done now would not be accurate."
Beskind says prosecutors may be able to work around that if they don't use biological evidence in a second trial. He says it's too soon to say whether the new concerns will be a blow to the defense or the prosecution, leaving that to a judge to make a ruling.
Although a new trial date hasn't been set, the defense attorneys said, in the motion, they are prepared to start trial at the end of 2016.
Time Warner Cable News reached out to District Attorney Roger Echols for a comment, but haven't heard back.