Sunday, August 05, 2007
Another dubious NY case
And the real killer walks free on procedural grounds
As a producer for "Dateline NBC," Katonah resident Dan Slepian has covered many stories, from the Columbine High School massacre to the death of Anna Nicole Smith. But one story, a case involving the possible wrongful conviction of two men, has caused him to agonize for more than five years. "It has been nagging at me because of the facts of the case," said Slepian, 37, who grew up in White Plains and graduated from White Plains High School.
On Thanksgiving night in 1990, a bouncer outside the the former Palladium nightclub on West 14th Street in Manhattan was shot and killed. David Lemus and Olmedo Hidalgo were convicted in the slaying and were sentenced to 25 years to life in prison in 1992 on the basis of eyewitness testimony.
In 2005, 15 years after they were arrested, new evidence - which attorneys and detectives contend was willfully neglected - led a judge to set aside Hidalgo's conviction, and a retrial was ordered for Lemus on the original charges. The trial is scheduled to begin in October, two years after Lemus' release. A two-hour documentary about the case produced by Slepian, who has been following the story since 2002, will air tonight on NBC.
The documentary reveals that a former Manhattan assistant district attorney, Daniel Bibb, had serious doubts about Lemus' and Hidalgo's guilt even as he argued for their prosecution. Bibb says in the documentary that as he led a new investigation of the case in 2004, he became convinced the men were innocent. "Dan (Bibb) has since left the D.A.'s office, saying he was tortured by the fact that his superiors forced him to argue to keep two innocent men in prison," Slepian said.
Slepian's involvement in the case was serendipitous. In 2002, he was beginning to shoot a documentary for "Dateline" about the detectives of the Bronx Homicide Task Force. He was assigned to follow two 20-year veteran detectives, Bobby Addolorato and his partner, John Schwartz. "I worked their hours, ate at their hangouts and saw the grisly crime scenes they faced every day," Slepian said.
The three were out to dinner one night when Slepian asked Addolorato if he brought his job home with him. "And he says, 'I really don't. Except this one case that keeps me up at night,' " Slepian said. The journalist in him, Slepian said, immediately recognized this would be a story worth pursuing.
In 1994, two years after Lemus and Hidalgo were convicted in the killing of bouncer Marcus Peterson, Addolorato and a federal prosecutor, Steven Cohen, while investigating a South Bronx drug gang, got a confession from one of its members that he and another man were responsible for the Palladium killing, Slepian said.
After years of trying to convince the Manhattan District Attorney's Office of the men's innocence, and being told by their superiors to back off, the detectives had had enough. By 2004, both Schwartz and Addolorato retired from service.
"These were two veteran homicide detectives fighting the system they swore to uphold," Slepian said. A "Dateline" report aired in 2005 featured Thomas Morales, who was believed to be the real shooter and was tracked down by NBC producers. Morales was arrested weeks later and spent nearly 18 months in jail awaiting trial in Peterson's slaying.
Morales is now free after a judge threw out the case, saying law enforcement had the obligation to arrest him years ago based on the ample evidence it possessed pointing to him as the shooter, Slepian said. "This is the reason I got into journalism, to do stories of this type and to give voice to people who have no voice," he said. "I was given front-row seats to watch how the criminal justice system works. "It was disappointing to watch the wheels of justice grinding so slowly."
Lemus, who was released on a $100,000 bond, currently lives in Florida with his girlfriend and a 6-month-old son. His retrial is set to begin Oct. 22. After Hidalgo's conviction was overturned, he was deported to the Dominican Republic on an unrelated gun charge. "Dan has been living, breathing and sleeping this story for well over five years," said Jocelyn Slepian, 36, his wife of seven years. "This story raises many critical questions about how the system works."
Report here
(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)
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2 comments:
"Possible" wrongful conviction? The continued persecution of David Lemus is a canker on the face of justice. Morganthau should be prosecuted for his total lack of ethics in this ongoing travesty.
The case sounds pretty much like the Giovanni Reid/Carlton Bennett case in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that took place in 1991. The young indigent teenagers at the time of their arrest and wrongful convictions are now grown men who are still trying to get their cases heard in court in the hopes of exoneration after having already served sixteen and a half years of a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for a crime in which they were not complicit.
The police and prosecutors deny any wrongdoing; despite the fact Reid’s case has a documented history of it. Reid’s case is in the courts now. The prosecutors’ office has been trying to keep both men locked up in the face of newly discovered exculpatory evidence dug up by a mother/daughter team.
As a result of the Giovanni Reid web site, http://www.giovannireid.com, a newly-discovered, previously untapped eyewitness has surfaced. He is the former friend and roommate of the robbery/murder victim and he exonerates both men.
In March 2007, at the behest of Assistant Prosecutor Emily D’Aguanno, two Philadelphia police detectives traveled to Tennessee to where the new witness lives, on the day before he was to board a plane to Philadelphia to prepare for the upcoming evidentiary hearing in Reid's case. The prosecutor’s office knew of the witness’s home address six months prior to dispatching the two detectives to Tennessee to “talk" to the witness on the day before he was to depart Tennessee. Before the detectives’ visit, the witness had been very eager to testify and now he is frightened and unwilling.
According to the witness, the detectives allegedly harassed, intimidated and threatened him with arrest and of what might happen to him if he were to show up in Philadelphia for the hearing. The witness was so scared that he called his local police on the Philadelphia policemen they were still on the premises; he says he used a ruse to get away long enough to place the call. Needless to say, he did not show up for the hearing. As a matter-of-fact, he has since missed two hearings and other professional appointments to prepare him for the hearing.
The witness claims that he had been told sixteen and a half years ago that one person had turned himself in and fell on the mercy of the court and that he thought to himself at the time, “Justice has been done.” He says that because he kept traveling around before settling in Tennessee, that he had, had no idea that two additional people had also been tried and convicted until he stumbled across the Giovanni Reid web site.
In addition, the government's purported eyewitness in the 1991 trial could not have eyewitnessed the crime; and also, she was not who she was presented to be before the jury. Both Reid and Bennett are in desperate need of attorneys who are willing to fight for them tooth and nail. The compelling update with many supporting documents case hopefully will be posted by the end of this week.
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