The vestibule was only about six feet wide and five and a half feet deep, a setting inconsistent with ballistics evidence and the medical examiner’s report. ![]() ![]() When Hale saw the brownstone, his suspicions increased. There was Smith’s recantation, for one, and, what’s more, forensic evidence had contradicted her assertion that Cash had been shot in the chest while standing in the building. Hale already had reason to doubt the account. She claimed that Cash then walked out of the house and up some stairs, then collapsed on the curb of the sidewalk, where he died. In Smith’s account, which prosecutors had relied on to convict Hamilton, she had said that Hamilton shot Cash in the chest while they were standing in the entrance of the brownstone. One day last year, Mark Hale, the assistant district attorney who runs the Kings County conviction-review unit, visited the scene of the Cash murder. In 2011, Hamilton was released on parole, with his conviction still in place, and in January, 2014, prompted by Hamilton’s lawyers, Thompson’s office began reviewing the case. Following Hamilton’s conviction, in 1993, he and his lawyers maintained this narrative-to no effect, even after Smith recanted her testimony. Although she had told the first detective on the scene that she hadn’t seen the shooting, she ultimately identified Hamilton as the murderer at trial, he was found guilty, and he received a sentence of twenty-five years to life in prison.ĭefense attorneys had focussed their case on alibi witnesses who contended that Hamilton was in New Haven, Connecticut, on the day of the murder. Detectives on the case relied largely on one eyewitness, Jewel Smith, Cash’s girlfriend, to build their case. He was twenty-seven at the time, and had previously been convicted of manslaughter, but was out on parole. In March of that year, Hamilton was arrested for the murder. Just over twenty-four years ago, on January 4, 1991, a man named Nathaniel Cash was shot and killed outside a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Thompson had had about two weeks before the meeting to review the case and a corroborating recommendation from an independent review panel, and now he had to decide whether the evidence exonerated Hamilton. The directors of a conviction-review unit he formed early last year had just explained their recommendation that he move to vacate Derrick Hamilton’s 1993 second-degree-murder conviction, for which Hamilton had served nearly twenty-one years in prison before being let out on parole. Last Tuesday, toward the end of an hour-long meeting, Kenneth Thompson, the district attorney of Kings County, New York, exhaled heavily several times, as though by breathing he could expel the dilemma in front of him. Robert Stolarik / The New York Times / Redux
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |