After “exhaustive” investigations by her Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz filed motions on Aug. 24 with defense attorneys to vacate three wrongful convictions after new evidence came to light. The drama played out over nearly two hours before Queens Supreme Court Justice Michelle Johnson, who granted the motions and dismissed the indictments against the three men who were present in her Kew Gardens courtroom.
CIU director Bryce Benjet presented the new evidence after a review of the case against Armond McCloud and Reginald Cameron found that their confessions in the 1994 shooting death of Kei Sunada at LeFrak City were unreliable because they were elicited by NYPD Det. Carlos Gonzalez, who is connected with two cases involving false confessions — the “Central Park Five” rape case in 1989 and the 1990 murder of a tourist from Utah who was in New York City to attend the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
Benjet also presented new evidence in the case of Earl Walters in which fingerprints implicated other men in the 1992 abductions and robberies of two women for which Walters served 20 years in prison.
“Fairness in the criminal justice system means we must re-evaluate cases when credible new evidence of actual innocence or wrongful conviction emerges,” Katz said. “Those who have served prison time for crimes they demonstrably did not commit deserve to have the slate wiped clean.”
In the People v. Walters case, on Sept. 2, 1992, two men approached a 22-year-old woman in Borough Park, Brooklyn, as she got out of a friend’s car in front of the building that she lived in when she was pistol-whipped and forced to lie on the floor in the back of the car. The assailants rifled through her belongings finding an ATM card and demanded the victim provide the PIN to them. The car was driven to an ATM on Hillside Avenue in Jamaica where the men withdrew approximately $2,000 in cash. They let the woman out in…
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