Westchester Review exonerates Brooklyn man after murder conviction

Twenty-eight years to the day after New York City police officers arrested him for a murder-robbery he didn’t commit, Antonio Mallet walked out of a Bronx courtroom an exonerated man .

As Mallet, now 54 and a resident of Brooklyn, stood before Judge Alvin Yearwood in a sparse courtroom at the Bronx courthouse Thursday, flanked by a team of lawyers, he spoke humbly about the ordeal that consumed his life for almost three decades. .

“It’s been a long road. For years I fought this case alone,” he said. “And the sad thing is, the reason we’re here today is what I’ve been saying all these years.”

But Mallet’s gratitude for his attorneys’ diligence and for Yearwood’s help — he eventually took over Mallet’s case and turned it over to the Westchester County district attorney’s office — was tempered by his anger at the system of police, prosecutors and judges that locked him up in 1999 and kept him locked up for so long.

It all started with a shooting in the Bronx

In 1996, a man named Michael Ledeatte was shot and killed in the Bronx during what appeared to be a stolen car deal gone wrong. Ledeatte had driven the car, a 1993 Lexus GS 300, to the sale location before dawn on a Tuesday morning.

His associate, Gregory Walker, was positioned about 140 feet behind the Lexus, waiting to pick up Ledeatte after the sale and drive him home. Instead, Walker saw two individuals approach the car, their faces obscured by their clothing and the surroundings dimly lit. One of them then shot Lédeatte.

After Walker called police, he was detained and questioned for more than 19 hours, according to legal documents recently prepared by the team of lawyers handling Mallet’s wrongful conviction case.

Walker later identified Mallet as the shooter, leading the jury to return a guilty verdict in March 1999. But the credibility of that identification did not please the trial judge at the time, who said: “I don’t know if he’s guilty; for having done this too long, I just don’t know,” according to a transcript of those proceedings cited by Mallet’s current attorneys.

Nevertheless, the judge refused to overturn the verdict and Mallet was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

In their new legal filing, Mallet’s lawyers wrote that Walker “was the prosecution’s only identifying witness and the only evidence linking Mr. Mallet to the crime.”

“No physical, forensic, ballistic or other evidence links Mr. Mallet to the crime,” they said.

Mallet was ultimately released on parole in 2019. During the 20 years he spent in prison, Mallet submitted about a dozen separate legal challenges to his conviction. All were rejected. One of the judges who rejected several of his requests, Darcel Clark, is now a Bronx district attorney.

Things finally changed when Mallet’s case was reassigned to Westchester

It wasn’t until Mallet was able to get his case reassigned to another prosecutor that momentum for his exoneration began to build. Yearwood heard Mallet’s most recent request and referred it to the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, which assigned the case to a task force looking into allegations of wrongful conviction.

In response to a request for comment, Patrice O’Shaughnessy, a spokeswoman for Clark, said the evidence reviewed by Westchester County “was never presented to prosecutor Clark when she was a judge” overseeing the challenges to Mallet regarding his conviction.

O’Shaughnessy’s statement noted that Clark, as prosecutor, supported reassigning the case to Westchester.

Anastasia Heeger, who heads Westchester’s Conviction Review Unit, wrote in a legal brief that Walker initially implicated Mallet “only after he made five statements and was subjected to hours of questioning,” including the suggestion Police said that if Walker did not identify a suspect, “the police might conclude that he was the killer.”

But in 2019, Heeger wrote, Walker completely recanted his identification, noting that “he did not get a good look at the shooter” at the time and that he identified Mallet “after physical and psychological coercion” from the police.

The lead detective on the case, Joseph Nieves, admitted to the Conviction Review Unit that “putting pressure on Walker with the empty threat of becoming a suspect was what caused Walker to implicate Mallet as a shooter,” Heeger wrote.

Lead detective faced allegations of misconduct

Mallet’s attorneys said that once Westchester began investigating the case, the conviction review unit obtained disciplinary records describing several prior allegations of misconduct against Nieves.

In one incident, Nieves was accused of hijacking a business owner’s video store and using the premises to sell counterfeit videos. New York City police investigated the incident, finding it “partially substantiated,” and Nieves was subsequently arrested in connection with the allegations, according to Mallet’s lawyers.

Another person, one of Nieves’ tenants, said Nieves “falsely accused her of illegally receiving electricity and used his connections with police to have the woman arrested,” Mallet’s lawyers wrote .

Despite these and other allegations of misconduct against a second officer involved in the case, “none of the officers’ disciplinary records” were turned over to Mallet’s defense attorney during the 1999 trial, wrote the current team of lawyers.

“This is one of the worst cases of wrongful convictions that I have seen,” said Ronald Kuby, the renowned civil rights attorney who is part of Mallet’s wrongful convictions team. “This case was bad from the start. These two cops were dirty cops at the time they made this arrest.”

“No one wanted to listen to me”

David Shanies, a civil rights attorney who is also part of Mallet’s wrongful conviction team, said they plan to file a federal lawsuit against the actors responsible for Mallet’s conviction.

“No one wanted to listen to me,” Mallet said after the hearing, reflecting on his struggle to obtain his exoneration. “When you read the record on these cops, they are some of the worst cops the NYPD has ever had.”

The problems with Walker’s memory, distorted by police from the start, illustrate how eyewitness testimony can be used as a weapon to justify uncertain or even false accounts.

In a written statement during his interrogation, Walker wrote that Mallet shot Ledeatte twice in the head. Lédeatte, in fact, had only been shot once. But the police didn’t know that. When officers took Ledeatte to the hospital after the shooting, an emergency room doctor falsely told a detective that Ledeatte had been shot twice, apparently confusing one entry and exit wound with two entry wounds. distinct.

The fact that Walker said the gun went off twice, even though he was present during the shooting and allegedly heard two shots, suggests that police taught him to accept this erroneous fact. At least that’s what Mallet’s lawyers think.

These types of eyewitness errors are common in wrongful conviction cases. According to Innocence Projects, eyewitness misidentification played a role in 69 percent of convictions overturned by DNA evidence. The nonprofit organization considers eyewitness misidentifications “the leading cause of these wrongful convictions.”

For Deborah François, an attorney on Mallet’s legal team, this case is the tragic embodiment of an even simpler principle, one that infects any criminal case where someone takes an oath to tell the truth: “Witnesses do terrible witnesses.”

Asher Stockler is a reporter for the USA Today Network New York. You can email him at [email protected]. Contact him securely: [email protected].