Lawyers: Man due to be cleared of 1989 NYC murder

NEW YORK (AP) — A man who has spent almost a quarter-century behind bars for murder is poised to be cleared of a killing that happened when he was 1,100 miles away on a Disney World vacation, his lawyers said Tuesday...

Adam Howard

Apr 8, 2014

The attorneys said they anticipate prosecutors joining them Tuesday in asking a Brooklyn judge to dismiss Jonathan Fleming’s conviction in the 1989 shooting. A key eyewitness recanted, new witnesses have implicated someone else and a review by prosecutors turned up a hotel receipt putting Fleming in Florida hours before the killing, defense lawyers Anthony Mayol and Taylor Koss said.

After being imprisoned for nearly half his 51 years, Fleming could walk out of court a free man Tuesday afternoon, the attorneys said.

“He is elated and stunned, while tempered by the fact that he realizes that this is just the first step in getting his life back,” Koss said.

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office declined to comment before the hearing.

From the start, Fleming told authorities he had been in Orlando, Fla., when a friend, Darryl “Black” Rush, was shot to death in Brooklyn early on Aug. 15, 1989. Authorities suggested the shooting was motivated by a dispute over money.

Fleming had plane tickets, videos and postcards from his trip, his lawyers said, but authorities suggested he could have been in New York at the actual time of the shooting, and a woman testified that she had seen him shoot Rush.

The eyewitness recanted her testimony soon after Fleming’s 1990 conviction, saying she had lied so police would cut her loose for an unrelated arrest, but Fleming lost his appeals.

The defense asked the DA’s office to review the case last year.

Defense investigators found previously untapped witnesses who implicated someone else as the gunman, the attorneys said, declining to give the witnesses’ or potential suspect’s names before prosecutors investigate them.

And prosecutors’ review produced a hotel receipt that Fleming paid in Florida about five hours before the shooting — a document that police had evidently had since they found in Fleming’s pocket on arresting him, Mayol and Koss said.

The expected exoneration, first reported by the New York Daily News, comes amid scrutiny of Brooklyn prosecutors’ process for reviewing questionable convictions — scrutiny that comes partly from the new DA Kenneth Thompson himself. He unseated longtime DA Charles “Joe” Hynes last year after a campaign that focused partly on wrongful convictions on Hynes’ watch. Hynes had created a special conviction integrity unit to review false-conviction claims, but some saw the effort as slow-moving and defensive.

Thompson took office in January. In February, his office agreed to dismiss the murder convictions of two men who had spent more than 20 years in prison for three killings, saying newly discovered evidence had raised substantial doubts about their guilt.

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