PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
They were sixteen years old when wrongly accused of murder after the police extracted false testimony from three teens, sentenced to life terms, and served 36 years behind bars before they were finally released. What a horror story. 36 years. That's not 12 years each. Each one was innocent. Each one had 36 years of their life torn out because of' police misconduct'. (Those words sound way too polite). I would like to think that such police abuse would not occur today - but that's just not case. The pages of this Blog are filled with recent cases in which innocent people - especially juveniles - have been tricked into making false confessions, identification procedures have been rigged, and as in this cases, witnesses have been pressured one ugly way or the other to give the police the evidence they want, as happened in this case. Videotaping of confessions has made it more difficult for police to get false confessions. The case of the Harlem Park 3 makes a compelling argument for videotaping the questioning of young witnesses.
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
IRONY OF IRONIES: From a defence motion reported in a previous post of this Blog:
"The motion said that in 1988, Watkins confronted Detective Kincaid during an encounter in prison. The conversation was recounted by David Simon, who was accompanying Kincaid, in Simon’s 1992 book Homicide: A Year of Killing in the Streets. According to the book, Watkins asked Kincaid if he remembered him. When Kincaid said he did, Watkins replied, “If you remember who I am, then how the hell do you sleep at night?”
Simon quoted the detective as saying, “I sleep pretty good. How do you sleep?”
“How do you think I sleep?” Watkins replied. “How do I sleep when you put me here for something I didn’t do.”
“You did it,” Kincaid said.
“The hell I did,” Watkins said. “You lied then and you lyin’ now.”
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "All three said the lawsuit yanks them back, mentally, to the terror of being pulled from their homes after midnight in November 1983, and being photographed as they walked into the Baltimore western district station. “It brings back the pain and suffering you’ve gone through,” Watkins said. “But I know it’s something that needs to be done. The state needs to be exposed. Every day of my life, because of this, is a struggle."------------------------------------------------------------
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The three maintained their innocence from the start, and testified in their own defense at trial. The lawsuit alleges that when Kincaid questioned Watkins in 1983, the detective told him, “You have two things against you — you’re black and I have a badge.” Kincaid and Joyce, the lawsuit claims, “coerced, suggested and/or fabricated a false statement and identification” from each of the three teens who’d been with Duckett. The lawsuit alleges the detectives “physically threatened” one of the teen witnesses and failed to disclose the witnesses’ initial failure to identify Chestnut, Stewart and Watkins. None of the witnesses’ statements was recorded.
PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Although witnesses said one person had killed Duckett, the Baltimore police somehow determined that three people were involved. Witnesses were shown photo lineups of Chestnut, Watkins and Stewart and repeatedly failed to identify them, Chestnut discovered in the police file. Baltimore assistant state’s attorney Jonathan Shoup told the judge at trial there were no such reports, and the judge sealed the file until Chestnut obtained it in 2018. Chestnut sent a handwritten letter to Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which began reinvestigating the case, and the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project lined up lawyers for the men. The two sides filed a joint motion to vacate the mens’ convictions, which was granted, and then prosecutors dismissed the case. The men walked out of the courthouse three days before Thanksgiving, exactly 36 years and one day after they were first arrested."
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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "Chestnut sent a handwritten letter to Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which began reinvestigating the case, and the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project lined up lawyers for the men. The two sides filed a joint motion to vacate the mens’ convictions, which was granted, and then prosecutors dismissed the case. The men walked out of the courthouse three days before Thanksgiving, exactly 36 years and one day after they were first arrested."
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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "Chestnut sent a handwritten letter to Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which began reinvestigating the case, and the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project lined up lawyers for the men. The two sides filed a joint motion to vacate the mens’ convictions, which was granted, and then prosecutors dismissed the case. The men walked out of the courthouse three days before Thanksgiving, exactly 36 years and one day after they were first arrested."
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STORY: "Men who wrongly served 36 years for murder sue Baltimore police, homicide detectives, alleging pattern of misconduct, by Reporter Tom Jackman, published by The Washington Post on August 13, 2020."
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GIST: "When Alfred Chestnut, Ransom Watkins and Andrew Stewart walked out of the Baltimore City courthouse last November, having each served 36 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit, they joined 10 other men who the courts concluded had been wrongly convicted of murder by Baltimore police and prosecutors between 1984 and 1999. “You take three kids’ lives and tear them apart,” Watkins said Thursday, “nobody wants to talk about it.” He was jailed at 16, and released at 52. “I’m struggling to get my life back on board.” On Thursday, the three men sued the Baltimore Police Department and the three lead detectives on their case, arguing that the police had a lengthy pattern of misconduct which has already cost the state of Maryland millions of dollars in wrongful conviction settlements. According to the National Registry for Exonerations, the 108 combined years that Chestnut, Watkins and Stewart served make their case the longest stretch of wrongful incarceration for one case in recorded American history.-----------------------------------------------------------------
“Once you read it,” Stewart said of the lawsuit, “it’s like it plays itself out again in your life. It just lets you know that a life that people should value, it’s not valued, particularly from a young man’s perspective. They knew we didn’t do it.”
The suit, filed in federal court in Baltimore, names former homicide detectives Donald Kincaid, John Barrick and Bryn Joyce as the defendants, in addition to the Baltimore Police Department. The state of Maryland has already paid the men settlements of $2.9 million. But that did not insulate the police from being sued for their role in what the lawsuit claims were a series of coerced statements by teenage witnesses who falsely accused Chestnut, Watkins and Stewart, and whose testimony convicted the defendants in the absence of any physical evidence. Arrested as juveniles and tried as adults. all three were sentenced to life in prison.
Kincaid told The Post in November that he did not coerce the witnesses or frame the three defendants. “What would I get out of that?” Kincaid said. “You think for one minute I want to send three young boys to prison for the rest of their life...I didn’t know those boys. I didn’t know them from Adam. Why would I want to do something like that?”
Kincaid, Barrick and Joyce are all retired, and a fourth detective not named in the suit has died. Kincaid and Barrick could not be reached for comment Thursday. Joyce said he had not seen or been told of the suit, and was “flabbergasted” to learn that the three defendants had been exonerated.
“Our objective when I was in the homicide unit,” Joyce said Thursday, “was to find the truth, no matter where it led us.” He said he did not have specific recollections of the Harlem Park case and that Kincaid was “an excellent detective” but he hadn’t spoken to him in decades. Joyce said he retired in 1984, before many of the other wrongful convictions noted in the lawsuit occurred.
The Baltimore police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chestnut, Watkins and Stewart were arrested at their homes early on Thanksgiving morning of 1983, and accused of the robbery and murder of DeWitt Duckett, a 14-year-old student at Harlem Park Junior High School. Duckett’s death six days earlier was the first homicide in a Baltimore school and created great pressure on police to solve the case, in which an armed assailant took a Georgetown Starter jacket while shooting Duckett in a hallway of the school, in front of at least two other students.
Convicted at trial and sent to adult prison at 17, the three defendants, now dubbed the “Harlem Park 3,” spent their first 12 years in the same institution before being split up, and they said they remain in daily contact today. They refused to admit involvement in the slaying and so were denied parole. Stewart said he gave up hope of ever being released.
But Chestnut kept pushing, and a freedom of information request eventually unearthed police reports showing that detectives had reports indicating another teen, who had been seen running from the school while discarding a gun, had admitted his involvement to others, and was seen wearing Duckett’s Georgetown jacket.
Although witnesses said one person had killed Duckett, the Baltimore police somehow determined that three people were involved. Witnesses were shown photo lineups of Chestnut, Watkins and Stewart and repeatedly failed to identify them, Chestnut discovered in the police file. Baltimore assistant state’s attorney Jonathan Shoup told the judge at trial there were no such reports, and the judge sealed the file until Chestnut obtained it in 2018.
Chestnut sent a handwritten letter to Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which began reinvestigating the case, and the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project lined up lawyers for the men. The two sides filed a joint motion to vacate the mens’ convictions, which was granted, and then prosecutors dismissed the case. The men walked out of the courthouse three days before Thanksgiving, exactly 36 years and one day after they were first arrested.
The lawsuit has new details about how police allegedly coerced and intimidated teenage witnesses into accusing Chestnut, Watkins and Stewart, who had been in the junior high school earlier in the day while skipping their own high school classes with two other friends. The five teens had visited old teachers and then been escorted off school property about 30 minutes before the shooting, the security guard who showed them out testified in 1984.
DeWitt had been walking with three friends in Harlem Park when he was shot. The friends told police that one person had approached DeWitt and demanded his jacket. The lawsuit alleges that in the days after the slaying, Detectives Kincaid, Joyce and Barrick questioned the friends, ages 14, 15, and 16, at least three times each, showing them multiple photo arrays which included Chestnut, Stewart and Watkins, but the witnesses didn’t pick any of the three out.
The three maintained their innocence from the start, and testified in their own defense at trial. The lawsuit alleges that when Kincaid questioned Watkins in 1983, the detective told him, “You have two things against you — you’re black and I have a badge.”
Kincaid and Joyce, the lawsuit claims, “coerced, suggested and/or fabricated a false statement and identification” from each of the three teens who’d been with Duckett. The lawsuit alleges the detectives “physically threatened” one of the teen witnesses and failed to disclose the witnesses’ initial failure to identify Chestnut, Stewart and Watkins. None of the witnesses’ statements was recorded.
Kincaid told The Post in November that he had not coerced or falsified any statements. “When I was in the crime scene up at the school,” Kincaid said, “three young girls approached me and told me who did it. I didn’t coerce them for nothing. They passed the information to me, that’s what opened up the case.” He retired in 1990.
A 13-year-old girl, who had not been in the hallway and hadn’t seen the shooting, signed a false statement written by Kincaid and Barrick “implicating the innocent teens,” the lawsuit states. Lawyers for the Harlem Park Three interviewed the witnesses and found that two of them told Kincaid and others “many times” that the 13-year-old “had not witnessed the murder,” but the detectives ignored them.
Baltimore prosecutors did not know that homicide detectives had fabricated the 13-year-old’s statement, the lawsuit states, that a total of four teens had been coerced into implicating the three suspects, and did not know that Kincaid, Joyce and Barrick had failed to investigate the suspect who was seen wearing Duckett’s jacket and discarding a gun near the school. That suspect was never charged, and was shot to death in West Baltimore in 2002.
The lawsuit lists 13 wrongful conviction cases attributed to the Baltimore police since 1968. In many of the cases, convictions were reversed when it was found that Baltimore police had coerced testimony or withheld information from defendants. The civil rights claims state that Baltimore police failed to take corrective action in the face of a “pattern and practice of misconduct in murder investigations,” even as the homicide unit was being featured in the book and television show “Homicide.”
Since Mosby took office in 2015, her Conviction Integrity Unit has reversed wrongful convictions nine times. The prosecutor also has been pressing for laws protecting juvenile witnesses. In the Harlem Park Three case, the teen witnesses were taken from school, coached in numerous meetings and interrogated without parents present, the lawsuit states.
All three defendants said they have had difficulty adjusting to their new lives “I’m still trying to piece everything together in my life,” Chestnut said. He is the only one of the three who has not yet found a job. “I’m a baby,” Chestnut said. “Everything is new to me.”
Stewart said, “We didn’t receive any kind of counseling or transition help to ease us back into society.” He has moved to South Carolina, where his mother now lives, but says he has had trouble reconnecting with his family. “My faith is my salvation.”
All three said the lawsuit yanks them back, mentally, to the terror of being pulled from their homes after midnight in November 1983, and being photographed as they walked into the Baltimore western district station. “It brings back the pain and suffering you’ve gone through,” Watkins said. “But I know it’s something that needs to be done. The state needs to be exposed. Every day of my life, because of this, is a struggle."
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https://www.unionleader.com/news/crime/men-who-wrongly-served-36-years-for-murder-sue-baltimore-police-homicide-detectives-alleging-pattern/article_5592d943-87d6-58d3-ab37-edc6d2cbdf90.html?block_id=849464
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Read News 11 story with quotes from Andrew Freeman - one of the lawyers representing the Harlem Park 3 - at the link below:
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The police, in their rush to judgment, decided they were the ones they wanted to prosecute,” said Andrew Freeman, one of the attorney’s representing the "Harlem Park Three.”..."They didn't bother looking at really strong evidence about the real killer and concealed evidence that these folks were innocent, threatened witnesses,” Freeman said.
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GIST: "They were 16 years old when their lives changed forever after they were charged with a murder they did not commit. The three, now men, are suing the Baltimore Police Department for the decades they spent behind bars.
Lawyers for the three say Baltimore police detectives in 1983 coerced four young students into falsely testifying in the case.
The men spent 36 years each behind bars and are now suing for damages.
It was the walk of freedom for the men exonerated last November, hugging their loved ones after spending nearly 40 years each behind bars for a murder they did not commit.
"The police, in their rush to judgment, decided they were the ones they wanted to prosecute,” said Andrew Freeman, one of the attorney’s representing the "Harlem Park Three.”
The Harlem Park Three are Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart and Ransom Watkins.
After being exonerated last year, Chestnut, Stewart and Watkins are now suing Baltimore police after they were wrongly convicted for the murder of Harlem Park Junior High School student Dewitt Duckett.
"They didn't bother looking at really strong evidence about the real killer and concealed evidence that these folks were innocent, threatened witnesses,” Freeman said.
In November 1983, someone shot Duckett in the hallway of the junior high school over his Georgetown University jacket.
Years later, a witness recanted his testimony that he saw the shooting and another witness admitted to lying on the witness stand. This, as Freeman says the real suspect was seen by other witnesses.
"That night, he was seen with the jacket. That afternoon, he was actually seen throwing the gun away. People told police that and police just ignored it,” the attorney said.
The teens, wrongfully convicted, with decades spent in prison -- time, Freeman says, they'll never get back.
"First, I hope they never do this to anyone again, but secondly, they need to fully compensate these three men for stealing their lives,” Freeman said.
When 11 News asked Baltimore police for comment, the department responded, saying, "We can't comment on pending litigation.”
Read the entire 11 News story at the link below.
Read the entire 11 News story at the link below.
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/attorney-andrew-freeman-for-man-of-harlem-park-3-discusses-details-of-lawsuit/33608522
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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