A $25 Million Mistake That the City Won’t Admit - The New York Times

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”



— A queen, in “Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There,” by Lewis Carroll.



A court notice made public this week provides the following information: Everton Wagstaffe and Reginald Connor, who spent years in prison wrongly convicted of a kidnapping, will be paid a total of $25.578 million by the city and the state.



Mr. Wagstaffe, who served close to 23 years, is to be paid a total of $14.578 million, and Mr. Connor, who did more than 15 years, $11 million. The state’s share is about $6 million; the rest comes from the city, according to the men’s lawyers, Jonathan Moore and Nick Brustin.



The city will not make any admission of wrongdoing, officials say.



Which may come as a relief, or a surprise, to the public, who might have naïvely assumed that the payment of more than $25 million to two men sent to prison for a crime they did not commit was, in some small way, a sign that something had been seriously screwed up.



But no.



Since the beginning of 2014, the city has paid at least $199,508,000 — call it $200 million — to people wrongly convicted of crimes, according to the city comptroller’s office. In virtually every settlement, the city disclaims wrongdoing. This legal twitch may provide some protection if other people emerge to piggyback on the original lawsuits.





Everton Wagstaffe, in prison in 2008, also had his conviction in the Negron case overturned in 2014. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Photo by: Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Making mistakes is one of the things humans do best. Learning from them is trickier.



When people trip and fall at subway stations, transit officials make sure the lights are changed regularly, that the steps have fresh treading and that obstacles are relocated.



Drop a jar of tomato sauce in a supermarket, and someone is likely to turn up in a minute or two with a broom and mop to clean up the mess — and to make sure that another shopper doesn’t go flying across the pasta aisle.



Send the wrong person to prison for 23 years, we write a check and say, No problem there!



The men had been convicted of the kidnapping of Jennifer Negron, a 16-year-old girl from East New York, Brooklyn. Her body was found on a street corner on New Year’s Day, 1992, and the case was designated homicide number 001, the first of about 2,000 that year. Her death made no impression on the city.



Detectives in the 75th Precinct declared the murder case solved within a couple of days, having called upon a regular informant, a desperately ill woman addicted to crack who supported herself with prostitution and tip money from the police. Supposedly, she identified the two men by looking in a book of police photos; in fact, the detectives had picked out their pictures and she merely ratified their selection.



Mr. Wagstaffe said this week that in 2001 he read an article by Patrice O’Shaughnessy in The Daily News about highly questionable practices by a prominent detective in Brooklyn. He recognized the name from his case and, quietly aided by a prison worker, sifted through records and wrote thousands of letters.



For years the Brooklyn district attorney’s office defended the convictions. Sloppy, palpably false police work and testimony were written off as immaterial.





Jennifer Negron in a memorial page from her high school yearbook in 1993.

No police interview of the owner of the car supposedly used in the kidnapping, who said she had it at church at the time of the crime. No interview of a girlfriend with whom Mr. Wagstaffe was living and who provided an alibi, saying she had spent New Year’s Eve with him at their home in Long Island. No interview of a man in Jennifer’s building who said he witnessed, from the roof, her being accosted by teenage boys, including a spurned suitor, who tried to pull her into a car.



No interviews of Jennifer’s classmates, who said that her mother had visited their school after Jennifer’s death to warn them against trusting the wrong boys.



The prosecutors were opposed by lawyers who represented the two men without charge, including Myron Beldock, David Toscano, Irving Cohen and others. At 84, Mr. Beldock, near the end of his life, argued in front of an appellate court that the convictions had to be overturned. The judges agreed unanimously.



Much has changed in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office since then, under Kenneth Thompson and his successor, Eric Gonzalez. The city is far more peaceful; the police far less swamped with murder cases. Yet far too often, there is little appetite to harvest mistakes for lessons.



A teenage girl was killed. Two innocent men were sent to prison for the crime. The public is paying $25.6 million. The real killer or killers went unapprehended.



And nothing was done wrong.



Alice’s queen can add another item to her list of impossible things."



A $25 Million Mistake That the City Won’t Admit - The New York Times