Web produced by Bill King and Jennifer Matarese, Eyewitness News
NEW YORK (WABC) --
There is vindication for two men who spent 21 years in prison for a brutal triple murder they say they didn't commit.
Now, a new life begins for Tony Yarbough and Shariff Wilson,
who were just teenagers when they were convicted of murdering Yarbough's
own mother and sister, as well as the sister's friend. For the first time in their adult lives Friday, they are waking up in their homes instead of a prison cell. They were freed after a judge overturned their convictions, which
came at the ages of 15 (Wilson) and 18 (Yarbough) after they were
arrested back in 1992 in the grisly triple murder in Coney Island.
"I don't even know how to describe it," Yarbough said. "I'm overwhelmed right now. I'm so grateful."
The pair took their first steps as free men Thursday after the
handcuffs were ordered off while family members cried and cheered.
"I just want to thank my lawyer and everybody that believed in me that I didn't do this crime," Wilson said.
On Thursday, Wilson celebrated a night of firsts -- the first black
cherry soda, the first slice of pizza, the first chance to use a fork
without looking over his shoulder.
"Upstate when they feed
you, they give you a metal fork, but you have to turn it in before you
leave," he said. "If not, they'll put you in a box."
The
Brooklyn District Attorney's Office asked that the murder convictions be
vacated against both men. Mom Annie Yarbough, 12-year-old sister
Chavonn Barnes and her 12-year-old friend Latasha Knox were found inside
a Coney Island project, stabbed and strangled, more than two decades
ago. Tony Yarbough and Wilson had been out in the West Village when the
killings took place and returned home to find the bodies.
Lawyers have argued for years that there was never any physical evidence
linking the men to the killings and the only evidence against Tony was
Shariff's confession, which he recanted in 2005. He claimed police
coerced him, and he has passed several polygraph tests since.
The game changer in the case came last summer, when the city's medical
examiner revealed that the DNA found under Annie Yarbrough's fingernails
matched evidence found in the 1999 killing of Migdalia Ruiz, who was
found raped and stabbed to death in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn.
That murder happened while Tony and Shariff were already in jail,
meaning the real killer had struck again and was still on the loose.
"There were a number of factors that led to the innocence of both of
these guys," Yarbough's lawyer Philip Smallman said. "The DNA, I think,
in many ways, is just the icing on the cake.
Family members reacted with joy and were overcome with emotion when the men were unshackled and set free.
"I'm just so excited," mom Gloria Wilson said. "I don't know how to
act. He's like a new toy to me. That's my gift back to me."
Tony Yarbough was arrested so quickly after the crime that he doesn't
even know where his relatives are buried. Thursday though, he had
nothing but relief and heartfelt gratitude.
"I got Jesus in my
life, there's no time for bitterness," he said. "I'm going to live my
life to the best of my ability right now."
Tony initially received the maximum sentence of 75 years to life behind bars.
The real killer has never been caught or identified.
"It's pretty clear that somebody is responsible for four bodies and
still hasn't apparently been taken to justice for those acts," Smallman
said. "This case is a perfect storm of everything that can go bad in a
criminal case."
The world is a very different place now, and
Wilson says he is trying to decide whether to get an iPhone or a Samsung
Galaxy.
Attorneys for Kalvin Michael Smith, convicted in the 1995 beating
of a manager at the former Silk Plant Forest store, will take his case
to the U.S. Supreme Court after the lower court declined to reconsider
its decision to deny his appeal.
James Coleman, one of Smith’s attorneys, said in an email Tuesday
that they plan to file a petition in May to the U.S. Supreme Court,
asking it to review the decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
4th Circuit in Richmond, Va.
On Feb. 21, the appeals court denied a petition
to reconsider its dismissal of Smith’s appeal. In January, a three-judge
panel of that court upheld a decision by U.S. District Judge Catherine
Eagles, who ruled that Smith had failed to comply with the one-year
deadline required for prisoners who want to appeal their convictions in
federal court.
Smith’s attorneys had asked that the full 16-judge panel review the decision.
Smith, 42, is serving up to 29 years in prison
for the beating of Jill Marker on Dec. 9, 1995. The assault left Marker
with traumatic brain injuries. She now lives in Ohio under 24-hour care.
Smith has maintained his innocence, and his case
has become the most prominent allegation of wrongful conviction in
Winston-Salem since the Darryl Hunt case. Hunt was freed in 2003 and
then exonerated the next year in the 1984 murder of Deborah Sykes, a
copy editor for the now-defunct afternoon paper, The Sentinel. A DNA
test led law enforcement to another man, who confessed to the crime. The
Winston-Salem Journal published a series of stories in 2004 about the
Smith case, raising questions about the police investigation and the
prosecution.
Coleman and David Pishko, also one of Smith’s
attorneys, had argued in the petition before the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the 4th Circuit that Eagles was wrong in ruling that Smith could
have discovered certain evidence favorable to him before the deadline,
which would have been Aug. 30, 2007. Smith filed his appeal in 2010.
Coleman and Pishko argued that Smith couldn’t
have found the evidence because Forsyth County prosecutors suppressed it
and didn’t turn it over as they were required to do.
It wasn’t until Aug. 30, 2007, for example, that
prosecutors acknowledged that Marker did not identify Smith out of a
photo lineup that contained Smith’s picture during a meeting with
Winston-Salem police detectives on Oct. 31, 1996, the petition said.
Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill has
said that the rules of professional responsibility prevent him from
commenting on pending litigation. The N.C. Attorney General’s Office is
representing Forsyth County prosecutors in Smith’s appeal.
In court papers, state prosecutors have defended Smith’s conviction.
Glenn Ford, 64, talks to the media as he leaves the maximum-security Angola prison in Louisiana. Source: WAFB-TV 9
Glenn Ford has been freed from the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana
having lived under the shadow of the death sentence for 30 years. He
becomes one of the longest-serving death row inmates in US history to be
exonerated.
Ford was released on the order of a judge in
Shreveport after Louisiana state prosecutors indicated they could no
longer stand by his conviction. In late 2013 the state notified Ford’s
lawyers that a confidential informant had come forward with new
information implicating another man who had been among four
co-defendants originally charged in the case.
He was sentenced to
death in 1984 for the murder the previous November of Isadore Rozeman,
an older white man who ran a Shreveport jewellery and watch repair shop.
The defendant had worked as an odd jobs man for Rozeman. In interviews
with police Ford said that he had been asked to pawn a .38 revolver and
some jewellery similar to that taken from Rozeman’s shop at the time of
the murder by another man who was among the initial suspects.
Asked
as he walked away from the prison gates about his release, Ford told
WAFB-TV, “It feels good; my mind is going in all kind of directions. It
feels good.”
Ford said he did harbour some resentment at being wrongly jailed: “Yeah, cause
I’ve been locked up almot 30 years for something I didn’t do.
“I can’t go back and do anything I should have been doing when I was 35, 38, 40 stuff like that.”
Dr
Phillip Rozeman, nephew of the victim, told the Shreveport Times said
that district attorney’s office had alerted the family in advance that
new evidence had been obtained that, had it been available 30 years ago,
might have had an impact on the verdict or death sentence. “We
understand that and actually believe the DA is acting honourably. This
is positive reflection on the criminal justice system that does the
right thing for people.”
Ford’s conviction bears all the hallmarks
of the glaring inconsistencies and inadequacies of the US justice
system that are repeatedly found in cases of exoneration. The fact that
despite serious qualms among top judges about his conviction this
innocent man was kept on death row for so long is certain to be seized
upon by anti-death penalty campaigners.
Among the many all too
typical problems with his prosecution was the composition of the jury.
An African American, Ford was sentenced to death by a jury that had been
carefully selected by prosecutors to be exclusively white.
His
legal representation at trial was woefully inexperienced. The lead
defence counsel was a specialist in the law relating to oil and gas
exploration and had never tried a case in front of a jury; the second
attorney was two years out of law school and working at the time of the
trial on small automobile accident insurance cases.
At the trial
the state was unable to call any eyewitnesses to the crime, nor was it
able to produce a murder weapon. Instead Ford was convicted largely on
the testimony of a witness who was not a detached observer – she was the
girlfriend of another man initially suspected of the murder.
Under
cross-examination the witness, Marvella Brown, admitted in front of the
jury that she had given false testimony. “I did lie to the court… I
lied about it all,” she said.
In another classic element
frequently found in exoneration cases, cod science provided by “expert”
witnesses also helped to put Ford on death row. One such expert
testified that the evidence pointed to the defendant because he was
left-handed; another expert told the jury that particles of gunshot
residue had been found on his hand; and a third talked about fingerprint
evidence implicating him.
The testimony from all three expert witnesses was later shown to have been at best inconclusive, at worst wrong.
Ford
continued to profess his innocence throughout the 30 years. In the
appeal process that ensued, the Louisiana supreme court, the state’s
highest legal panel, acknowledged that the evidence against him was “not
overwhelming” and that the prosecution case was open to “serious
questions”, yet it decided to keep him on death row.
More
recently it emerged that state prosecutors had failed to disclose
evidence to Ford’s legal team that could have been crucial in his
defence. It included evidence from confidential informants pointing the
finger at Ford’s co-defendants, who faced initial charges that were then
dismissed as the prosecution bore down against the wrong man.
In
a statement Ford’s current lawyers, Gary Clements and Aaron Novod, said
they were pleased by the exoneration. “We are particularly grateful
that the prosecution and the court moved ahead so decisively to set Mr
Ford free.”
Ford becomes the 144th death row inmate to be exonerated
over the past four decades, underlining the perils of innocent people
being sent to their deaths in America’s capital punishment system. Yet
despite such warning, several states such as Alabama, California, Florida and Missouri
have taken recent steps to speed up the process of executions and
whittle down the recourse to appeals in a way that had such expedition
applied in Ford’s case would already have seen him put to death.
Richard
Dieter, an authority on capital punishment at the Death Penalty
Information Center, said that Ford’s case “painfully reveals the
fallibility of the death penalty and the risks we take with every death
sentence. Some states are trying to speed up executions instead of
addressing the underlying problems that have led to such mistakes.”
David
Love, executive director of Witness to Innocence, an organisation of
exonerated death row survivors and their loved ones, said that attempts
to speed up the time from conviction to death showed that for some
politicians “it’s more important to have finality than to have justice. I
believe that’s a misguided approach. As we see more and more innocent
people like Glenn Ford released from death row, that’s a wake up call
that we have to look at our broken system.”
Ford will now go
through the long process of trying to rebuild his life on the outside.
Under Louisiana law he can apply for compensation of up to $25,000 for
each year lost to detention, but only up to a ceiling of $250,000.
As
for the Isadore Rozeman case, it has now officially reverted to the
status of an unsolved homicide. The local district attorney’s office
said that an investigation is under way into “certain individuals”
suspected of having been involved in the murder.
Web produced by Bill King and Jennifer Matarese, Eyewitness News
