Prosecutors to try to free man jailed for 20 years on 'wrongful' murder charges
|
Version 0 of 1. Richard Rosario thought he could quickly clear away suspicion in a New York City killing when he gave police the names of 13 people who could vouch for his being in Florida when the shooting happened. Instead, he was arrested, found guilty and imprisoned for 20 years so far. He has lost multiple appeals. But prosecutors plan to ask a judge on Wednesday to overturn Rosario’s murder conviction and free him as they reinvestigate his 1996 case. His attorneys call it an illustration of unreliable eyewitness testimony, bungled defense and the difficulty of fighting a guilty verdict. “It really is a case study in a wrongful conviction,” said one of his lawyers, Glenn Garber of the Exoneration Initiative. “But he hung in there,” Garber said, “and finally he’s getting some level of justice.” The office of the Bronx district attorney, Darcel Clark, confirmed on Tuesday it would seek to have Rosario’s conviction thrown out, but not to dismiss the charges against him, at least for now. Clark took office two months ago, succeeding Robert Johnson, who spent 27 years as the Bronx DA. The new district attorney’s announcement came just days ahead of a Dateline series on the case. It adds to a roster of more than 25 convictions from New York’s high-crime 1980s and 90s that prosecutors have disavowed in the last five years. “It’s a great result. It just should have happened a lot earlier,” said another Rosario lawyer, Chip Loewenson. Rosario, now 40, was arrested after two witnesses identified him from a police photo book as the man who had shot George Collazo in the head after an exchange of words on a Bronx street on 19 June 1996. No forensic or physical evidence tied Rosario to the crime. He said he had been over 1,000 miles away, staying with friends in Deltona, Florida. After returning to the Bronx once he heard police were looking for him, he listed over a dozen people who had seen him in Florida. Police did not contact those people, according to Rosario’s current lawyers. And his own court-appointed attorneys at the time did not fully explore the alibi witnesses, either. After phoning the witnesses proved difficult, his initial attorney got a judge’s approval to pay to send a private investigator to Florida, but the attorney later acknowledged she never did it. Another lawyer took over before Rosario’s trial, and mistakenly thought the court had nixed funding for the investigator’s Florida trip. That attorney did not pursue it further, according to a 2010 appeals court decision. The couple who said they had hosted Rosario testified at his trial and said they had good reason to remember his presence and other details from the day of Collazo’s killing: their first child was born the next day. But the trial prosecutor urged jurors to discount them because of their friendship with Rosario. During Rosario’s appeal, a judge said additional alibi witnesses would not have added significantly to his defense. Rosario’s lawyers argue otherwise, noting that some of the witnesses were not close with Rosario and so might have been more difficult to discredit. |