By COLIN MOYNIHANMARCH 11, 2014
Three Bronx men who were set
free last year after spending nearly 18 years in prison for two murders they
say they did not commit are suing New York City and the two lead police
detectives on the case, accusing them of deliberately using tainted or false
evidence.
The lawsuits, filed in Federal
District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday, stem from the 1995 murders of a Federal
Express executive, Denise Raymond, and a cabdriver, Baithe Diop. The killings,
which took place in the Soundview neighborhood in the Bronx three days apart,
were thought to be related.
Seven people were indicted in
the two murders and six were convicted. But the convictions began to come apart
in 2012, when an investigator with the United States attorney’s office in
Manhattan obtained confessions from two former gang members who said they had
killed Mr. Diop. In 2013, the Bronx district attorney’s office acknowledged
problems with evidence used to tie defendants to the murder of Ms. Raymond. The
indictments in both cases were vacated, and those imprisoned were freed.
The lawsuits claim that the
detectives, Michael Donnelly and Thomas Aiello, improperly conducted
identifications of suspects, coerced false statements from witnesses, provided
nonpublic details to witnesses to bolster false accounts, failed to follow up
on leads and hid evidence. The suits also cite a key prosecution witness who
later recanted.
“When you’re innocent and
you’re in prison knowing that you didn’t commit this crime, the pain is
double,” said Carlos Perez, who, along with Michael Cosme and Devon Ayers,
filed the lawsuits against the city. “It hurt me emotionally, it hurt me
psychologically; many times I cried.”
A spokesman for the Police
Department did not reply to a request for comment. Spokesmen for the New York
City Law Department and the Bronx district attorney’s office declined to
comment, with the district attorney’s office citing the pending litigation.
Similar suits were filed
recently by Cathy Watkins and Eric Glisson, who were also convicted of killing
Mr. Diop, and were freed in 2012; and by the estate of Israel Vasquez, who was
convicted of killing Ms. Raymond but freed in 2007 by an appeals panel. City
lawyers asked a judge to dismiss the Vasquez case last year, rejecting all
assertions of wrongdoing by the detectives and saying that the witness’s
recantation was not credible.
Mr. Perez’s lawsuit states that
Detectives Donnelly and Aiello ignored certain leads. For instance, the suit
asserts, the detectives did not interview a man who had pawned a bracelet
bearing Ms. Raymond’s initials. And, the suit said, they did not pursue records
from Mr. Diop’s cellphone, which had been stolen after his killing and used to
call an apartment where the men who later admitted killing him, Jose Rodriguez
and Gilbert Vega, were living.
That failure left the two “free
to continue committing violent crimes in the Bronx for years,” the suit says,
adding that Mr. Rodriguez had been involved in a shooting in 1997 that killed
two people during a Thanksgiving football game between residents of two public
housing complexes.
“This case is particularly
egregious,” said Elizabeth Saylor, a lawyer at the firm Emery Celli
Brinckerhoff and Abady, which is representing Mr. Perez, Mr. Cosme and the
estate of Mr. Vasquez. “Six people were incarcerated for 100 years in this case
because of the detectives’ misconduct.”
Because no physical evidence
linked any defendant to either killing, the prosecution relied heavily on
witnesses. Among them was Kim Alexander, who testified that she had seen
another man, Charles McKinnon, arguing with Ms. Raymond as she left work the
day before she was killed.
Detective Aiello picked up
security video tapes from the building where Ms. Raymond worked, then wrote in
a report that he had viewed the material “with negative results,” causing a
prosecutor to state in court that there was “nothing” on the tapes.
Later, however, it turned out
that a tape showed Ms. Raymond but not Mr. McKinnon, undermining the
prosecution’s contention that an argument between the two had led to a murder
plot. Judge William C. Donnino said that the failure to turn over the tape was
“serious,” adding that it contained “evidence that is arguably favorable to the
defense.”
Another prosecution witness was
Cathy Gomez, a teenager who could not read or write English. In 1995, Ms. Gomez
signed a detailed statement that provided a basis for later courtroom testimony
saying that Mr. Cosme had displayed a silver-colored revolver, given her a
blow-by-blow account of killing Mr. Diop, then shown her a phone that he said
had come from Mr. Diop’s car. But in 2012 Ms. Gomez said that Detective
Donnelly had written the statement and that she had signed it without knowing
what it said. “Nothing’s true in there,” she told a lawyer representing Mr.
Glisson, according to a transcript of a videotaped interview.
Mr. Perez has always maintained
his innocence.“This whole case was fabricated,” he told Judge Donnino. “I’ve
been framed by a ruthless crooked homicide cop.”
