The New York Times
They spent 24 years behind bars. Then the case collapsed.
NEW YORK – The weekend before Christmas 1996, the owner of a store was opening his store to cash checks in Queens, alongside a policeman who worked as a security guard, when the two were ambushed by a group of men, shot and dead. The case sparked a ferocious manhunt and, in a few days, three men were arrested. They were convicted in separate trials and sentenced to 50 years and life in prison for murder. However, more than two decades later, the case collapsed. Sign the New York Times newsletter The Morning On Friday, a state judge in Queens rejected the convictions of all three men and warned prosecutors for withholding evidence that would have cast serious doubts about his guilt. Prosecutors never delivered police reports showing that investigators had linked the deaths to other men, members of a local mugging ring. And five witness accounts – never seen by defense lawyers – contradict the men’s confessions, which were wrong in the main details of the crime and which the lawyers say were coerced. The three men – Gary Johnson, 46; George Bell, 44; and Rohan Bolt, 59 – left the prison walls on Friday afternoon, each with tears streaming down his face as he hugged his families. “We finally made it,” shouted Bolt, as he shook hands with two of his grandchildren for the first time. “The district attorney’s office deliberately withheld from the defense reliable information about the guilt of others,” said Judge Joseph A. Zayas to the men, who appeared virtually in court. He said the prosecution “has completely abdicated its role of seeking the truth in these cases” and suggested that it may have been because prosecutors knew that the evidence would have undermined the men’s chances of conviction. Queens County District Attorney Melinda R. Katz supported the reversal of the convictions because of the new evidence. But she hardly said that the men were innocent. Your office plans to review the case for 90 days before deciding whether to try again. “I cannot support these beliefs,” said Katz in a statement on Friday. “However, at this point, there is not enough evidence of real innocence, and therefore we are taking this opportunity to reevaluate and examine the evidence.” A review unit set up by Katz to investigate possible unlawful convictions found no intentional misconduct on the part of the district attorney’s office. Zayas disagreed on Friday, calling the office’s position “perplexed” and saying prosecutors concealed evidence and misrepresented the facts. The lawyers also said it took Katz’s office months to agree to release the men, even after the evidence was analyzed. In their lawsuit, they argued that Katz’s position denied men “the complete justice they deserved”, with much of the initial evidence against them crumbling. “This should have been done a year ago. What were they doing that led them to drag their feet? “said Mitchell Dinnerstein, one of Bell’s trial lawyers. He added that he believes the firm took its position because it was” trying to protect “the prosecutors involved, one of whom is still working there.” I can’t think of any other explanation, ” Bell and Johnson were 19 and 22 at the time of their arrests, while Bolt, 35, owned a restaurant and was married, the father of four, and the mayor of the city, Rudy Giuliani, put intense pressure on detectives to resolve one of the victims was the sixth police officer killed that year, and it was three days before Christmas day, but recently discovered documents – police reports, records and notes – shed new light on the case. a gang, known as the Speedstick, to the murders. Two of the gang members told detectives that another member suggested he was involved, along with the Speedstick leaders. The shooting months later – which involved one of the gang’s leaders – described several striking similarities to the December crime. And the investigators of the two cases also met to discuss them. But prosecutors repeatedly claimed that there were no records linking the crimes and rejected efforts to connect them at trial. The lawyers argue that the evidence has been suppressed. “In the history of New York State, this is one of the most abusive violations of an individual’s constitutional rights that I can imagine has ever happened,” said Marc Wolinsky, a lawyer for Bell. The case represents the first test of how Katz handles allegations of misconduct by the prosecutor. Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors say the bad behavior went unnoticed by the district’s district attorney for 27 years, Richard A. Brown, who died in 2019. Previous office leaders defended him and say these concerns were prioritized when they emerged. After taking office at the beginning of last year, Katz established a unit to review potential illicit convictions, something his predecessor has long refused to do. The unit’s investigations led two men in separate murder cases to be released from prison last year after witnesses recanted or new DNA tests cast doubt on a man’s guilt. The unit took on the case of the three men convicted of the 1996 shooting in March, following a request from the men’s lawyers, and spent months unearthing new documents. The report found that the supporting evidence was not presented, and the lawyers for the three men said they began negotiations on the release of the men before Thanksgiving. They accused Katz of moving slowly, even after the problems in the case became clear. Chris Policano, a spokesman for the office, said in a statement that Katz “shows no fear when it comes to reviewing the prosecutor’s cases” and is implementing measures to improve communication and information sharing across the office. “In that case, our sentencing integrity unit concluded that there was no misconduct by the prosecutor,” he added. “That said, there has been a considerable examination of institutional conscience and we have taken steps to ensure that this type of Brady error does not occur again.” Brady’s Rule requires prosecutors to provide supporting evidence for the defense. The issues in the case are a clear example of the behavior that some lawyers say has long been neglected in the Queens district attorney’s office. Judges ruled that prosecutors misbehaved in at least 117 cases between 1985 and 2017; a lawyer who reviewed the office’s convictions found that prosecutors were rarely punished. One of several prosecutors in all three cases, Brad A. Leventhal, was among them. Court records show that a three-judge appeals panel overturned a conviction in one of Leventhal’s attempted homicide cases, ordering a retrial in 2006 based on “repeated cases of misconduct by the prosecutor’s office” during interrogation of a witness and closing arguments. Leventhal, now head of the office of the office’s Homicide Trial Office, postponed the comment to Jennifer Naiburg, an assistant chief of the district attorney in the office. Naiburg said Leventhal handled about 85 cases as a defense lawyer and prosecutor and, except in 2006, he was not sanctioned for misconduct and none of his convictions were reversed. The office does not plan to review the previous convictions of individual prosecutors, since the review unit determined that there was no intentional misconduct. Some of the undisclosed police reports, however, have been used in other cases. And notes written by Charles Testagrossa, a former district attorney in the Queens District Attorney’s office, suggest that he knew that a Speedstick member may have driven a van used in the killings at the check discount store. Testagrossa, who now works in the Nassau county attorney’s office, said in a statement on Thursday that he “revealed all the defense material” he knew in the case and throughout his career. “I have always believed that all parties to a trial – the victims and their families and the defendants and their families – deserve impartiality and justice,” he said. At each man’s trial, prosecutors relied on different evidence, including two of the men’s first confessions, the identification of an eyewitness, the report of a prison informant and the testimony of a fourth man who was also charged with the murders. No physical evidence, however, linked any of the men to the crime, according to court documents. Johnson and Bell confessed to the murders several days after they occurred, at Christmas. Johnson, however, did not even know the color name of the used getaway car. Bell also offered several descriptions that appear to have been provided to him by officers – and detectives employed tactics while questioning him that they are known to lead to false confessions, lawyers argue. Records show that he also told a lawyer at the time that he was repeatedly beaten and beaten by a detective. Questions were also raised about the reports of important witnesses. A man, who has already died, could not have witnessed the shooting from where he said he was, the experts later discovered. The report of a prison informant who testified against Bell and Johnson was also placed in serious doubt. “When this unfortunate journey started, I was only 19 years old. I was just a child without a clear understanding of the law or even my own rights, ”said Bell at the hearing on Friday. “Thank you for giving me a second chance at life.” This article was originally published in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company