NYC to Pay $3.5 Million to Wrongfully Imprisoned Asian Man

Testimony bought and paid for again. Any prosecutor or other officer found to have done this should be jailed

In one of the largest wrongful-conviction payouts in state history, New York City has agreed to pay $3.5 million to a Queens man imprisoned for 12 years after being found guilty of attempted murder. The man, Shih-Wei Su, was convicted by a jury in 1992 after Queens prosecutors knowingly presented false testimony from the star witness, according to a ruling in 2003 by the United States Court of Appeals, which overturned Mr. Su's conviction and condemned the Queens district attorney's office.

But even after the settlement was finalized in federal court on Thursday, Mr. Su said he was still angry. "The settlement doesn't buy back the time I lost and doesn't do real justice, but the amount shows the public something is very wrong here," said Mr. Su, now 35 and a financial consultant in Manhattan. "I did 12 years on a wrongful conviction, and no one was punished for it." In a statement, a spokeswoman for the city's corporation counsel called the settlement "in the best interest of all parties."

Joel B. Rudin, Mr. Su's lawyer, said that his research showed that about 80 Queens convictions over a 15-year period ending in 2003 had been reversed because of prosecutorial wrongdoing, but that those prosecutors had never been disciplined.

A spokesman for the district attorney, Richard A. Brown, declined to comment on the case or Mr. Rudin's research. He referred to a letter from Mr. Brown published in The New York Times in 2007 that said most of the cases dated from before his time as district attorney, and that altogether they represented "less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the hundreds of thousands of cases prosecuted during the two-decade span that the list encompasses, and many ultimately resulted in conviction after retrial or by guilty plea."

In 2003, Mr. Rudin helped get a $5 million settlement for a man who had served seven years on a conviction of raping a girl at a Bronx day care center. A judge threw out the conviction, saying that the prosecutor had withheld evidence that could have acquitted the man.

In Mr. Su's case, prosecutors argued at trial that Mr. Su ordered fellow members of a youth gang, the White Tigers, to shoot a member of a rival gang, the Green Dragons, in a Bayside pool hall in 1991. He was convicted with the help of testimony from a key witness who agreed to testify against him after being promised by prosecutors leniency regarding his own crimes. On the stand, the witness denied having made such a deal.

Mr. Su was sentenced to 16 to 50 years in prison. He was released in 2003 after a federal appeals court ruled that the lead prosecutor in the case, Linda Rosero, elicited false testimony from the witness and misled jury members, telling them there was "technically no agreement" regarding the witness's testimony. "A conviction that is obtained through testimony the prosecutor knows to be false is repugnant to the Constitution," the panel said. "The prosecutor is an officer of the court whose duty is to present a forceful and truthful case to the jury, not to win at any cost." Reached at home on Friday, Ms. Rosero, who is no longer with the district attorney's office, declined to comment.

Original report here



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