Murder conviction tossed after 26 years
There were dozens of witnesses when a gunfight broke out on a street corner in Buffalo, New York, on Aug. 10, 1991. At least three people were injured, and Torriano Jackson, 17, was killed.
Valentino Dixon, then 21, was at the scene. Hours later, he was arrested. And in 1992, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to almost 40 years to life in prison, with no chance of parole until 2030.
For years, Dixon fought that conviction from behind bars. No physical evidence had ever connected him to the murder, and another man had confessed more than once.
After nearly three decades and a couple of unusual twists, his murder conviction was vacated Wednesday — and Dixon, 48, walked free.
“I felt like I was in some type of dream,” he said in a phone interview from a Red Lobster, where he was surrounded by friends, relatives and lawyers, and about to eat lobster for the first time.
As he struggled to get his conviction overturned, Dixon got help from a varied cast of characters. They included journalists at Golf Digest, a new district attorney in Erie County, witnesses whose accounts were never presented at trial, a dogged team of undergraduate students at Georgetown University, and one man who had direct experience with long incarcerations: Martin Tankleff, who was imprisoned for 17 years after being wrongly convicted of murdering his parents and was released in 2007.
In the beginning, Dixon’s case was covered mostly by The Buffalo News. But it gained more widespread attention in 2012 because of Dixon’s art. In prison, for hours a day, he liked to draw detailed landscapes in colored pencil. Golf courses were a frequent subject. That caught the interest of journalists at Golf Digest, and the magazine profiled Dixon.
In 2017, a new district attorney, John Flynn, took office in Erie County and established a conviction integrity unit to investigate cases that might merit review.
And in 2018, a course called Prison Reform Project was offered for the first time at Georgetown University, led by the director of the university’s Prisons and Justice Initiative, Marc M. Howard. Howard has known Tankleff since they attended the same preschool, and they taught the course together.
In an interview Wednesday, Tankleff said he had never heard of an undergraduate class like this one. “This is not a course about make-believe cases,” he said. “These are real people, real lives, realworld implications.”
With several cases to choose from, three students chose Dixon’s case and gathered evidence. They tracked down witnesses, pored over documents, called Dixon on the phone several times a week and visited him in prison. Eventually, they were convinced he was telling the truth, and they made a short documentary on the subject.
Their work helped Donald M. Thompson, a lawyer for Dixon, make his case to the district attorney. In an interview Wednesday, Flynn said the newly discovered evidence from various witnesses attesting to Dixon’s innocence was deemed credible.
That evidence included confessions from Lamarr Scott, who has said several times that he killed Torriano Jackson, although he did once recant a confession. On Wednesday, Scott, who is in prison for an unrelated shooting, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in connection with Jackson’s killing.
Now, Dixon has plans. He said he wanted to cook breakfast — and then lunch, and then dinner — for his mother and his grandmother Thursday. He wanted to visit a golf course (he has never played) and take his children fishing.
And then he wants to work on criminal justice reform, with a focus on his home state of New York. “I’m going to dedicate my life to fighting mass incarceration,” he said.