Steven Ruffin was just 18 when he was wrongfully convicted of murder, and now, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit is moving to overturn the court’s decision.
Photo courtesy of the Legal Aid Society
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced Thursday that his office is moving to vacate the wrongful manslaughter conviction of a man found guilty in 1996 in a case of mistaken identity.
Steven Ruffin was just 18 when he was wrongfully convicted of the murder of a 16-year-old, as determined by a comprehensive investigation conducted by the DA’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU), which revealed that Ruffin’s defense team had failed to present crucial evidence proving another individual’s responsibility for the killing during the trial.
Ruffin served nearly 14 years in prison before he was paroled in 2010.
“After a full investigation by my Conviction Review Unit, we can no longer stand by this old conviction and will move to give Mr. Ruffin his good name back,” Gonzalez said in a statement on Jan. 18. “A confluence of factors, including errors by defense counsel and tunnel vision by law enforcement, produced a tragic result in this case – Mr. Ruffin was convicted for the actions of a different person whom he claimed to be the killer all along. We will continue to correct miscarriages of justice and to learn from the mistakes we uncover to ensure that they never happen again.”
In 1996, then-17-year-old high school student Ruffin was living with his family in Crown Heights. On the night of Feb. 6, Ruffin’s sister Diana, a college freshman, was assaulted on her walk home. She told her family members and her then-boyfriend what had happened and all of them set out to canvas the neighborhood for the perpetrator.
Eventually, several members of the group encountered the victim, James Deligney, and his sister. A confrontation occurred with Deligney being shot and killed during the altercation.
Despite…
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