A Queens judge on Thursday vacated the convictions of three men who spent years in prison for crimes they have long maintained they did not commit.
In one case, Justice Michelle A. Johnson tossed out decades-old convictions against Reginald Cameron and Armond McCloud, who maintained they were both coerced into confessing the 1994 killing of a Japanese exchange student. The Queens district attorney’s office said the confessions included inaccuracies about what happened that also appeared in police reports, and were elicited by a detective connected to other cases involving false confessions — including the later-exonerated teens often called the “Central Park Five.”
In another case, she vacated a conviction against Earl Walters, who the DA’s office said was wrongfully accused of kidnapping and robbing two women in 1992.
In a phone interview after the hearing, McCloud said he felt like his voice had finally been heard.
“These 29 years, I’d be the first to tell you, was not kind for me,” he said. “But I kept it pushing, I kept it moving, and hoped for a better tomorrow.”
After 10,607 days, McCloud said, a “better tomorrow finally came.”
The DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which reviews potentially wrongful convictions, asked Johnson to overturn the convictions after it reinvestigated the cases in partnership with Rutgers University’s New Jersey Innocence Project, Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, the Exoneration Initiative and the Legal Aid Society’s Wrongful Conviction Unit.
“Fairness in the criminal justice system means we must re-evaluate cases when credible new evidence of actual innocence or wrongful conviction emerges,” DA Melinda Katz said in a press release. “Those who have served prison time for crimes they demonstrably did not commit deserve to have their slate wiped clean.”
Units like the one that cleared Cameron, McCloud and Walters have become increasingly common among prosecutors offices’
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