City pays record $17.5 million settlement after wrongful conviction

A man acquitted after serving more than two decades in prison for Queens murders he did not commit will receive a $17.5 million settlement from New York City, an apparent record, according to his attorney and city records.

The man, George Bell, was convicted along with Gary Johnson and Rohan Bolt of the 1996 murders of the owner of an East Elmhurst check-cashing store and an off-duty police officer who provided security. Mr. Bell was sentenced in 1999 to life in prison without parole.

In 2021, a judge threw out the three men’s convictions and warned prosecutors against withholding evidence that could have cast doubt on their guilt. The judge also ruled that prosecutors had made false statements during the trial.

“These three defendants were undoubtedly wronged by the prosecutorial misconduct,” Judge Joseph A. Zayas of the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court wrote in his ruling.

Mr. Bell’s settlement, confirmed by the city’s legal department, is the largest the city has paid for a wrongful conviction, said Richard Emery, Mr. Bell’s attorney. The city comptroller’s annual reports show nothing higher.

“It recognizes the terrible suffering that a young, innocent man went through, receiving the death penalty for three years and a further 21 years of life without parole,” Mr Emery said.

The deal comes after Mr. Bell reached a $4.4 million settlement with the state, Mr. Emery said.

The three men’s exonerations came shortly after Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz created a unit in her first year on the job to review cases that may have led to wrongful convictions. The review unit said there was no intentional misconduct by the agency in its handling of the men’s cases.

During a hearing on the waivers, Judge Zayas said the prosecutor had “completely abdicated his truth-seeking role in these cases.” Two prosecutors who had overseen the cases – Brad Leventhalwho still worked in the Queens district attorney’s office, and Charles Testagrossawho worked as chief of investigations in the Nassau County district attorney’s office, later resigned.

In recent years, more and more convictions from the 1990s — when rising numbers of murders and other crimes in New York City prompted law enforcement agencies to aggressively pursue arrests — have been expunged. District attorneys have also established conviction integrity units to review potentially wrongful convictions. In fiscal year 2022, New York City settled cases involving 16 wrongful convictions, the most of any year, according to a report by the city ​​controller office. The settlements totaled nearly $87 million.

Allegations of misconduct against the Queens the Public Prosecution Service is not new. After the East Elmhurst exonerations, law professors filed grievances against 21 Queens prosecutors in several cases and built a website where they published relevant documents online.

But Mr. Emery said Mr. Bell’s exoneration not only represented justice for him but also reflected reforms in the Queens district attorney’s office since Ms. Katz took office.

The murders of the store owner, Ira Epstein, who was known as Mike, and the off-duty officer, Charles Davis, during an early morning robbery attempt on the weekend before Christmas in 1996, put great pressure on police to investigate the find a man. murderers. Mr. Davis was the sixth officer killed that year.

Investigators were on a break Dec. 23 when they arrested a man on charges of selling marijuana, court documents show. After days of interrogation and ‘a series of statements of evolving content’, the man told police that he had been on the lookout for the attempted robbery at the store and indicated that Mr Bell and Mr Johnson had been involved, together with two others. The informant gave a nickname for one of the other unknown men, to which a police officer said Mr. Bolt responded.

Mr Bell, then 19, and Mr Johnson, who was 22, were arrested on December 24. Mr Bolt, 35, a restaurant owner and married father of four, was arrested on December 25.

After being questioned, Mr. Bell and Mr. Johnson initially confessed to their involvement in the crime, but quickly recanted, according to court documents. Mr. Bolt denied his guilt and “made no incriminating statements.”

Years after their conviction, contemporaneous documents showed that police had linked members of a gang known as Speedstick, which had committed armed robberies in the area, to the murders.

Another shooting months later involving one of the gang’s leaders was so similar that investigators met to discuss both crimes, court documents show. But at the insistence of attorneys before and during Bell’s trial, prosecutors claimed no documents existed linking the cases.

The suppression of the Speedstick evidence was not “an isolated instance of misconduct, but part of a larger pattern of conduct intended to deprive the defendants of a fair trial,” Judge Zayas wrote in 2021. The pattern “was particularly egregious given the fact that the death penalty was demanded against 19-year-old George Bell.”

At the time of his arrest, Mr. Bell was working as a warehouse boy at an Old Navy store and was an aspiring DJ. Months after his release from Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, NY, Mr. Bell stood before Hofstra University students and gave a speech.

“I’m just a 19-year-old kid from Queens who likes to play records, be with my family and love life — that’s all I wanted to do,” he said. “I never thought I would be in prison fighting for my life.”