The New York Times
They Spent 24 Years Behind Bars. Then the Case Fell Apart.
NEW YORK — On the weekend before Christmas in 1996, a shop owner was opening his check-cashing store in Queens, alongside an off-duty police officer who was working security, when the two were ambushed by a group of men, shot and killed. The case touched off a ferocious manhunt, and within days, three men were arrested. They were convicted in separate trials and sentenced to between 50 years and life in prison for murder. But more than two decades later, the case has collapsed. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times On Friday, a state judge in Queens threw out the convictions of all three men and admonished prosecutors for withholding evidence that would have cast serious doubt on their guilt. Prosecutors never turned over police reports showing that investigators had linked the killings to other men, the members of a local robbery ring. And five witness accounts — never seen by defense lawyers — contradicted the men’s confessions, which were wrong on key details of the crime and which lawyers say were coerced. The three men — Gary Johnson, 46; George Bell, 44; and Rohan Bolt, 59 — stepped outside prison walls Friday afternoon, each with tears streaming down their faces as they embraced their families. “We finally made it,” Bolt shouted, as he clutched two of his young grandchildren’s hands for the first time. “The district attorney’s office deliberately withheld from the defense credible information of third-party guilt,” Justice Joseph A. Zayas told the men, who appeared in court virtually. He said that the prosecution had “completely abdicated its truth-seeking role in these cases” and suggested that may have been because prosecutors knew the evidence would have hurt the chances of convicting the men. The Queens County district attorney, Melinda R. Katz, supported overturning the convictions because of the new evidence. But she stopped short of saying the men were innocent. Her office plans to review the case for 90 days before deciding whether to retry them. “I cannot stand behind these convictions,” Katz said in a statement Friday. “However, there is at this time insufficient evidence of actual innocence, and therefore we are taking this opportunity to reevaluate and examine the evidence.” A review unit Katz created to investigate possible wrongful convictions found no intentional misconduct by the district attorney’s office. Zayas disagreed Friday, calling the office’s position “perplexing” and saying prosecutors had hidden evidence and misrepresented facts. Lawyers had also said it took Katz’s office months to agree to release the men even after the evidence was reviewed. In their court filing, they argued that Katz’s position denied the men “the complete justice they deserve,” with much of the initial evidence against them having fallen apart. “This should have been done a year ago. What were they doing that caused them to drag their feet?” said Mitchell Dinnerstein, one of Bell’s trial lawyers. He added that he believed the office had taken its position because it was “trying to protect” the prosecutors involved, one of whom still works there. “I can’t think of any other explanation,” he said. At the time of their arrests, Bell and Johnson were 19 and 22 years old, while Bolt, 35, was a restaurant owner and married father of four. The city’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had placed intense pressure on detectives to solve the case; one of the victims was the sixth officer killed that year, and Christmas Day was three days away. But recently uncovered documents — police reports, records and notes — shed new light on the case. The police reports connected members of a gang, known as Speedstick, to the murders. Two of the gang members had told detectives that another member had suggested he was involved, along with Speedstick’s leaders. Witnesses to…
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