After 28 years, ‘likely innocent’ man leaves prison
PHILADELPHIA — Twenty-eight years after police arrested Chester Hollman III for murder, 25 years after a judge sentenced him to life in prison, and seven years after a key trial witness admitted she had falsely implicated him because of pressure from investigators, a judge on Monday accepted prosecutors’ acknowledgment that Hollman was “likely innocent” and freed him from prison.
The ruling by Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Gwendolyn N. Bright came after prosecutors and Hollman’s defense lawyer jointly petitioned the judge to throw out his conviction in a 1991 killing near Rittenhouse Square. The District Attorney’s Office concluded that prosecutors and police from that time had hidden evidence that pointed to more viable suspects.
Hollman was 20 years old with a job and no criminal record when he was arrested. He’s now 48. He wasn’t in court to hear the news. But about eight hours later, he walked out of the state prison in Luzerne County, into the arms of his overjoyed family members.
“It’s so surreal,” Hollman said, standing outside the correctional facility where he had spent the last quarter-century. “I’m just happy and thankful and looking forward to starting the rest of my life.”
Hours earlier, it was his longtime appeals lawyer, Alan Tauber, who relished the ruling after a yearslong battle in the courts.
“This is a glorious day,” Tauber said, standing outside the Stout Center for Criminal Justice in Philadelphia. “We have a flawed system and innocent people do go to jail. But we have a great system, because there is a means for correcting that.”
Hollman’s case drew new attention after an April 2017 report in The Inquirer recounted his case in a story highlighting the pervasive practice of lying in the criminal justice system — by suspects, witnesses, and law enforcement.
A podcast, Undisclosed, then raised more questions about Hollman’s arrest and the verdict against him. Tauber said both accounts “lent a lot of credibility at a key time.”
Hollman’s is the eighth murder conviction that the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office has helped to reverse since Larry Krasner took over the office in January 2018, according to Assistant District Attorney Patricia Cummings, supervisor of the unit.
At a late-afternoon news conference with Cummings, Krasner said the Hollman case shows that his office is “doing justice over cases in the past.”
Cummings blamed past prosecutors and the Philadelphia Police Department for suppressing evidence that pointed to other suspects in the August 20, 1991, shooting of University of Pennsylvania student Tae-Jung Ho.
“It was pretty clear to us,” she said, “that unfortunately the Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office actually had evidence in their possession back at the time of trial (that), had they disclosed it to the defense that they’re constitutionally and ethically required to do ... Mr. Hollman might not have ever even stood trial.”
Bright’s ruling was a stunning reversal of her own past decision on the case. After a hearing in 2012, she ruled that Hollman did not deserve a new trial even after the key prosecution witness, Deirdre Jones, admitted that she had lied to jurors in 1993. Jones had told them she had been riding in an SUV with Hollman and two others that night in 1991 when she watched two of them get out and heard a gunshot.
Jones, who was then a neighbor of Hollman’s, has since said that police had pressured her to incriminate Hollman. David Baker, the now-retired detective who took Jones’ original statement, denied in the 2012 hearing — and again in a 2017 interview with The Inquirer — that he had coerced her testimony.
Jones has since said her conscience had bothered her for years, and that’s why she eventually agreed to tell a judge that she had lied at Hollman’s trial.
Tauber was not Hollman’s trial lawyer. But he has been working for years behind the scenes — and in court appeals — to win Hollman’s release.