A latticework of a prison in the United States.David Madison / Getty
A judicial error has cost three innocent men to spend almost a quarter of a century in prison for a crime that, according to evidence not presented at trial, they did not commit.
A judge from the district of Queens (New York) has this Friday annulled the convictions of the three alleged perpetrators of a double homicide perpetrated in 1996 in that district, and reprimanded the prosecutors of the case for withholding evidence that sowed serious doubts about the responsibility of the inmates, sentenced to sentences that ranged from 50 years in prison to life imprisonment.
On the eve of Christmas 1996, the owner of an exchange business and his security guard, an off-duty policeman, were assaulted by a group of men, who shot and killed them.
Several days later, and after a hunt for the man without quarter, three men were arrested and later tried separately.
The three entered jail, from where they left this Friday after the ruling of the Queens judge who dismantled the case.
According to the ruling, prosecutors never released police reports in which investigators linked the double murder to other perpetrators, members of a local criminal gang.
The accounts of five witnesses, to which the defense of the accused did not have access, contradicted the confessions of the defendants, who in turn gave wrong details about the crime scene and which, according to their lawyers, were obtained under duress.
"We did it," exclaimed Rohan Bolt, 59, as he was released from prison in Green Haven, New York State.
Next to him, raising his fist in victory, were Gary Johnson, 46, and George Bell, 44, all three African Americans.
With tears in their eyes, they hugged their relatives, and Bolt was able to caress his grandchildren for the first time, explains
The New York Times
in its digital edition
.
“The district attorney's office deliberately withheld reliable information from the defense regarding the involvement of third parties,” explained the Queens judge, Joseph A. Zayas, in a virtual hearing, underlining the resignation of the prosecution's functions, “for completely abdicating of his responsibility in the search for the truth ”probably because he knew that these unpublished evidence would have meant exonerating the detainees and having to start over.
Bolt, Johnson and Bell will be able to sleep at home with their families starting Friday, but Queens District Attorney Melissa Katz does not yet consider the men to be innocent.
Although he supported the reversal of the convictions on the evidence of the new evidence, his office plans to review the case within 90 days before deciding whether they should be tried again.
The lawyers of the three men denounce that the Katz prosecutor's office took months to agree to decree the release of their clients, even after reviewing the evidence on which Judge Zayas based his ruling.
The defense considers that Katz "denies the men all the justice they deserve" even though the case has been dismantled.
Katz created a special unit to reevaluate possible judicial errors last year.
That of the three African-Americans in Queens would not be the first judicial error in the United States, whose justice treasures a long list of clamorous rulings.
In 2015, a prisoner of Mexican origin was exonerated after spending 20 years in prison for a violation he did not commit.
In 2019, the State of California paid $ 21 million to an innocent man who spent 39 years behind bars for two crimes he did not commit.
They are just two examples in a long list that abounds with African Americans and members of other minorities.