Long Island man free freed after wrongful imprisonment for a decade
Another Black man has been freed after wrongful imprisonment for many years – this time in a suburb of New York City.
Josiah Galloway walked out of a courthouse in Mineola, N.Y., Thursday, holding hands with his mother, a cancer patient. Galloway’s mother wept when a judge, just moments before, exonerated her son in the road rage shooting of a taxi driver in Hempstead, N.Y.
Galloway had served 10 years of his 25-year sentence, WCBS reported.
“It feels good to finally be vindicated from this,” Galloway, 31, told the station. “(I) bump into a lot of people in prison going through this,” he added. “Something has to change.”
Galloway, now 31, had always maintained his innocence.
The real attacker in the 2008 case is reportedly much taller than Galloway, but Galloway was picked out of a police lineup, WCBS reported. The shooter is in prison on unrelated charges but cannot be tried in the taxi case because the statute of limitations has run out, according to the station.
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The case was reopened for investigation after a caller to the Nassau County District Attorney’s office in July said that Galloway was not the attacker, Sheryl Anania of the county’s Conviction Integrity Unit told WCBS.
Galloway’s defense lawyer, Joseph DeFelice, told the station that this case is one example of how the criminal justice system is flawed.
“It just emphasizes that misidentification is one of the biggest problems in the criminal justice system,” DeFelice said. “Here, we had two people who (were) identified at trial. The descriptions didn’t really match, yet he (Galloway) was convicted.”
New witnesses were interviewed in the reopened investigation, News12 Long Island reported.
“This would come out eventually,” Galloway told News12. “What’s in the dark comes to the light eventually.”
