A judge in Queens, New York, dismissed 46 misdemeanor convictions in August 2024 after the officer involved in these arrests was convicted years later of perjury.
The 46 defendants were convicted between 2004 and 2011 of a wide range of misdemeanors, including trespassing and disorderly conduct. None received prison sentences, but several spent time in jail after their arrests before their cases were resolved.
In 2021, officers in the 113th Precinct arrested a man in the St. Albans neighborhood. Before a grand jury on August 11, 2021, Detective James Donovan testified about the arrest, and said he discovered the man sleeping in the back of a car, where he observed a pink-and-white gun near the man’s head. The man was indicted on a weapons charge.
As the case moved to trial, an assistant district attorney contacted Donovan in March 2022 and asked him to review his grand jury testimony. Donovan told the prosecutor that his testimony was inaccurate. The weapons charge was dismissed.
Another officer told prosecutors that he, not Donovan, had found and arrested the man; Donovan wasn’t there. Donovan pled guilty to third-degree perjury in May 2023. He also retired from the police force that year.
After Donovan’s plea, the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) in the Queens County District Attorney’s Office reviewed Donovan’s cases where he was the arresting officer. After identifying these 46 cases, the district attorney’s office contacted the Legal Aid Society’s Wrongful Conviction Unit, which agreed to represent the defendants.
Attorneys for Legal Aid and the CIU filed joint motions to vacate the convictions. At a hearing on August 8, 2024, before Acting Queens Supreme Court Justice Joanne Watters, Bryce Benjet, the CIU’s director, said the convictions couldn’t stand because Donovan—the essential witness in these arrests—was not reliable. “This is a matter of both constitutional importance as well as accountability,” Benjet said, according to the Gothamist website.
Justice Watters granted the motions and dismissed the charges that day. District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement, “We cannot stand behind a conviction where the essential witness was a law enforcement officer convicted of a crime that irreparably impaired his credibility.”
Elizabeth Felber, the supervising attorney of Legal Aid’s Wrongful Conviction Unit, told the Independent, “While we hope that this moment delivers some justice and closure to the New Yorkers impacted by these tactics, the sad reality is that many were forced to suffer incarceration, hefty legal fees, loss of employment, housing instability, severed access to critical benefits and other collateral consequences resulting from criminal convictions.”
– Ken Otterbourg
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Posting Date: 10-22-2024
Last updated: 09-13-2024