Man freed in '92 killings as witnesses step forward

STORMVILLE, N.Y. • A man who spent 22 years in prison for a double killing he said he didn’t do walked free Monday, his New York conviction overturned but prosecutors vowing to get it restored.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” Calvin Buari said as he left a prison in New York’s Hudson Valley, to cheers and hugs from a half-dozen loved ones who’d come to bring him home.

A judge had overturned the conviction and ordered the 46-year-old man freed without bail Friday, after two new-found witnesses testified they’d seen a different man commit the shooting and a third said Buari was chatting with her down the block when gunfire rang out. Administrative hitches delayed his release until Monday.

Brothers Elijah and Salhaddin Harris, both in their 20s, were parked on a Bronx street when a gunman walked up and fired about a dozen rounds into their car in September 1992.

Like Buari, they were part of a neighbourhood corps of crack sellers and suppliers; “I was very immature,” Buari says now. Authorities saw him as particularly ominous; then-District Attorney Robert Johnson said residents “had every reason to fear for their safety as long as he was free to roam the streets.”

Six months after the killings, Buari was charged. A half-dozen drug associates and acquaintances testified against him. A jury took only two hours to convict him of murder, and he was sentenced in 1995 to 50 years to life in prison. The case took a turn with a 2003 confession from another man: the key witness against him, Dwight Robinson. But Robinson later recanted, saying Buari had threatened him and offered him money to confess, which Buari denies. Courts refused to toss his conviction then.

The new witnesses — two of whom implicated Robinson — came forward after Buari’s lawyers and family publicized his exoneration effort in recent years. They testified at a recent hearing. Robinson, who’s in prison on a murder conviction himself, did not.