Imprisoned for 23 Years, Black Man Gets Retrial in Brooklyn Murder Case

From [HERE] After spending more than two decades in prison saying he was not guilty of murder, a Brooklyn man won a new trial this week after an appellate court vacated his conviction based on evidence that another man might have committed the crime and that a key trial witness had recanted her testimony.

The ruling followed four years of legal wrangling by the man, Derrick Deacon, 57, who was convicted in 1989 of robbing and shooting to death Anthony Wynn in the hallway of an apartment building in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

Glenn A. Garber, director of the Exoneration Initiative, a nonprofit group that represents people convicted of crimes who say they are innocent and has handled Mr. Deacon’s case, celebrated the decision. “We’re thrilled. Deacon has suffered a long time,” he said. “We’re hoping that the state is not going to retry him and if they do, we think he is going to get acquitted.” A spokesman from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said the office was reviewing the case.

Though Mr. Deacon argued he was elsewhere at the time of the murder, he was convicted based largely on the testimony of a superintendent in the building who said that he had seen Mr. Deacon arguing with the victim moments before the attack. But in 2001, a man named Trevor Brown became a cooperating witness in an unrelated federal investigation of the Patio Crew, a violent Jamaican gang that controlled the neighborhood where the murder happened. In the course of the investigation, Mr. Brown told members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that another member of the Patio Crew, a man known as Pablo, actually killed Mr. Wynn.  

 Mr. Deacon, serving time in prison in central New York, did not learn about Mr. Brown’s statements until years later when Emile Dixon, the leader of the Patio Crew who was convicted as a result of the federal investigation, noticed a record of Mr. Brown’s statements in his own court file. He sent the document to Mr. Deacon.

“After the murder, people who later became known as the Patio Crew and other people who lived in the area openly acknowledged Fire’s mistaken arrest for the Wynn murder,” Mr. Brown later wrote in an affidavit, referring to Mr. Deacon, who was known as Fire. “However, nobody dared inform the authorities for fear that Pablo’s implication would cause Pablo and people associated with him to take revenge.” 

Mr. Deacon filed a motion for his release based on the new evidence, which was rejected by a state supreme court judge after a special hearing.

Among those to testify at that hearing, in June 2009, was Colleen Campbell, a witness at the original trial whom defense lawyers had expected to say that the man she had seen flee the scene of the murder with a gun was not Mr. Deacon but who hedged on the stand and said she could not be sure. At the new hearing, she said she had been pressured by the police or prosecutors to provide “vague” testimony at trial and that the man she saw looked nothing like Mr. Deacon. “I was fearful of the real perpetrator and others who may have been associated with him,” she said in an affidavit filed as part of the motion. “Being noncommittal about Fire seemed to be the safest and easiest approach at the time.”

On Wednesday, the state court of appeals rejected the previous ruling and ordered that Mr. Deacon receive a new trial. “We find that the likely cumulative effect of the newly discovered evidence and the recantation testimony established a reasonable probability that the result of a new trial would be a verdict more favorable to the defendant,” the court wrote in its ruling.