Can Kenneth Thompson Restore Brooklyn’s Faith in Justice?  The New Yorker

"Just over twenty-four years ago, on January 4, 1991, a man named Nathaniel Cash was shot and killed outside a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. In March of that year, Hamilton was arrested for the murder. He was twenty-seven at the time, and had previously been convicted of manslaughter, but was out on parole. Detectives on the case relied largely on one eyewitness, Jewel Smith, Cash’s girlfriend, to build their case. Although she had told the first detective on the scene that she hadn’t seen the shooting, she ultimately identified Hamilton as the murderer; at trial, he was found guilty, and he received a sentence of twenty-five years to life in prison.

Defense attorneys had focussed their case on alibi witnesses who contended that Hamilton was in New Haven, Connecticut, on the day of the murder. Following Hamilton’s conviction, in 1993, he and his lawyers maintained this narrative—to no effect, even after Smith recanted her testimony. In 2011, Hamilton was released on parole, with his conviction still in place, and in January, 2014, prompted by Hamilton’s lawyers, Thompson’s office began reviewing the case.

One day last year, Mark Hale, the assistant district attorney who runs the Kings County conviction-review unit, visited the scene of the Cash murder. In Smith’s account, which prosecutors had relied on to convict Hamilton, she had said that Hamilton shot Cash in the chest while they were standing in the entrance of the brownstone. She claimed that Cash then walked out of the house and up some stairs, then collapsed on the curb of the sidewalk, where he died.

Hale already had reason to doubt the account. There was Smith’s recantation, for one, and, what’s more, forensic evidence had contradicted her assertion that Cash had been shot in the chest while standing in the building. When Hale saw the brownstone, his suspicions increased. The vestibule was only about six feet wide and five and a half feet deep, a setting inconsistent with ballistics evidence and the medical examiner’s report. Neither Cash’s body nor his clothes had shown evidence of a close-range shooting, and the location of the discharged shell casings indicated that the shooter had stood in the vestibule and shot outward, in the direction of the street. Hale also saw that Cash would have had to walk down a set of stairs, contradicting Smith’s assertion.* Moreover, Cash’s autopsy found evidence of injuries that would have made it impossible for him to walk after the fatal shot.

These problems proved decisive for Thompson. He decided to submit his motion to a judge, and, if the judge assents, Hamilton will become the eleventh person Thompson’s office has exonerated since he took office in January, 2014."