(Radio Iowa) – An Iowa inmate who has spent almost 50 years behind bars for a quadruple murder is hoping for another look at his case for what is claimed to be a new legal development. Jerry Mark was convicted of murdering his brother Leslie Mark, his sister-in-law, and their two children at their rural Cedar Falls home on Halloween 1975. Sioux City attorney Brian Vakulskas is an advocate of Jerry Mark and says he first heard about the case from his attorney father many years ago.

“When I became a lawyer, I started looking at the case closer and studied the transcripts. And I realized all the problems with the original trial and the prosecutorial misconduct that came with that,” he says. Black Hawk County prosecutors say Jerry Mark killed his brother and family because his brother inherited the family farm. Mark was a lawyer who lived in California and says he was on a cross-country motorcycle trip at the time of the murder. The State Public Defender’s Office recently filed paperwork asking for a new trial or for the conviction to be overturned. Vakulskas says the killings appeared to be a Mafia hit after a family friend had testified against a drug cartel.

“The fact that they never developed any suspect other than Jerry, this is a classic case of tunnel vision for prosecutors — you find a person, we can put a crime to it, and you can make all the evidence point to one person if you can and that’s our argument on appeal,” Vakulskas. Mark has made several appeals based on the evidence at the scene of the crime. A federal judge threw out Mark’s conviction in 2006, but an appeals court overturned the ruling.

Mark’s lawyers said in legal filings he was convicted of “junk science” and testimony that could have proven his innocence was not allowed. Vakulskas hopes things move quickly since Mark is 81 years old.