Freed Black Man who Spent 16 Yrs in Prison Alleges Prosecutorial (NYC) Misconduct

From [HERE] and [HERE] A man who spent more than 16 years in prison for the murder of a rabbi filed a civil lawsuit Wednesday alleging "blatantly illegal investigative tactics" were used by the Brooklyn prosecutors to secure his 1995 conviction.

Jabbar Collins, now 38 years old, was released from prison last June after prosecutors said they were abandoning efforts to retry him for the murder of Rabbi Abraham Pollack, who was fatally shot in 1994 during a robbery attempt in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Mr. Collins's conviction was vacated in May when information surfaced that one of the witnesses had recanted prior to the original trial; Mr. Collins's trial attorney was never notified. A witness at the hearing on a possible retrial said that when he refused to cooperate in the investigation, prosecutor Michael Vecchione threatened to hit him over the head with a coffee table.

The 106-page lawsuit filed Wednesday names the city and nine investigators and prosecutors, including Mr. Vecchione, as defendants. Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, declined to comment on behalf of the office, District Attorney Charles J. Hynes and Mr. Vecchione.

"Michael Vecchione is not guilty of any misconduct," Mr. Hynes said after Mr. Collins was freed last year.

The list of alleged misconduct contains a new charge that three notarized or sworn affirmations and affidavits purportedly signed by Mr. Vecchione appear to have been forged by a paralegal.

Mr. Collins's attorney, Joel Rudin, said he was preparing for a hearing in May when he noticed that a prosecutor's name on a faxed coversheet filled out by a paralegal looked similar to the one Mr. Vecchione purportedly signed on a notarized affidavit in the case.

Mr. Rudin pulled out several documents from his case file that bore Mr. Vecchione's signature. Most of the signatures had sharply written letters and included a middle initial "F," he said. But three of the documents appear to be written in a more looping style and don't include a middle initial, Mr. Rudin said.

Mr. Collins is a 10th-grade dropout who later earned his high-school equivalency degree and attended some college before his arrest. While imprisoned, he taught himself about state and federal records laws and filed scores of record requests to obtain exculpatory evidence that prosecutors hadn't previously disclosed. The story of how Mr. Collins managed to overturn his murder conviction after 16 years in prison was the subject of a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal last year.

Over the thousands of hours spent reading documents gathered in the case, Messrs. Rudin and Collins never thought to compare signatures. It happened almost by accident. "I wasn't looking for it," Mr. Rudin said. "All of a sudden I just saw it."

Mr. Rudin hired a court-certified handwriting expert who confirmed "with a reasonable degree of certainty" that the two apparently dissimilar Vecchione signatures "were not executed by the same individual," according to the lawsuit.

In looking at some of Mr. Vecchione's other prosecutions over the years, Messrs. Rudin and Collins said they found five other sworn documents purportedly signed by Mr. Vecchione that the handwriting expert believes don't match his signature.

The lawsuit also includes 56 appeals court decisions from the two decades in which Mr. Hynes has been district attorney in which Brooklyn prosecutors were found to have improperly withheld evidence potentially favorable to the defense or misled the court. No disciplinary action was taken against prosecutors involved in those cases, the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit claims that the "deliberate indifference" by Mr. Hynes "created an 'anything goes' atmosphere" that contributed to Mr. Collins's wrongful conviction.

Much of the lawsuit concerns Mr. Vecchione's conduct during the investigation and trial. The lawsuit claims that as the prosecution's case began to "evaporate" in 1995—with three witnesses either recanting, refusing to cooperate or fleeing the area in violation of probation—Mr. Vecchione employed illegal tactics to coerce the witnesses into giving false statements and testimony.

Mr. Collins, who now works as a paralegal in Mr. Rudin's office, filed the lawsuit himself Wednesday in Brooklyn federal court. The night before, when Mr. Collins arrived home from work, he said he found in his mail a notice summoning him to jury duty in the same court where he was convicted in 1995.