Where justice goes to die
Every one of the 600 attorneys who work for the Kings County District Attorney should demand an explanation from their bosses about the case of Gregory Ellis, a man who has served 24 years in state prison for a murder he almost certainly did not commit.
As in so many of dozens of wrongful convictions in Brooklyn that we already know about, the conviction of Ellis for a homicide in 1994 relied on testimony from a shaky eyewitness. And as in other exonerations, the handling of that witness appears to have been tainted by coercion, false statements by prosecutors and unlawful failures to share evidence.
“The DA’s office is resisting making a full disclosure of the evidence they suppressed, all while our client languishes in the 24th year of a life sentence,” is how Jabbar Collins, a top-notch legal analyst, put it to me.
Collins is an expert on these matters, having served 16 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit — an unjust conviction that was overturned after evidence surfaced of rampant misconduct by Brooklyn prosecutors in the office of former DA Charles Hynes.
Collins got a multi-million-dollar settlement and now spends time helping others get free. Ellis’ cases, says Collins, involves “Hotel Hynes” — the pernicious practice of holding reluctant people as prisoners by requesting a “material witness warrant” and keeping them locked in a hotel room until they agree to testify.
Arresting and locking up witnesses to compel testimony is generally legal, provided the judge and jury are informed that the witnesses is testifying under duress. The worst abuse takes place when prosecutors present coerced witnesses in court without telling the judge and jury that the testimony was the result of pressure.
Prosecutors in Hynes’ office frequently failed to disclose the use of coerced witnesses. That is how they unjustly convicted Collins and a string of other innocent men who spent decades behind bars.
Ellis claims that the line prosecutor in his case — former Assistant District Attorney Kyle Reeves — lied to the judge and jury at trial by not disclosing that a man named Richard Rivera, the sole eyewitness in the case, had strenuously tried to avoid testifying against Ellis, and only did so after being locked up in a Hynes Hotel, with doors shackled and guarded by detective-investigators.
“This witness had refused to testify the morning when he was scheduled to appear at trial,” Collins told me. “And rather than disclose this to the defense and allow the jury to learn of this witness’ reluctance and assess his credibility, the prosecutor chose to suppress it and present an entirely false narrative at trial.”
If that’s true, it wouldn’t be the first time Reeves was found to have engaged in witness shenanigans. Last year, a man named Jabbar Washington was set free, after 20 years behind bars, because Reeves concealed from defense attorneys the fact that a witness had formally recanted her identification of Washington in a lineup.
Rita Dave, Ellis’ attorney, told me the Brooklyn DA’s office has stonewalled and lied for 24 years about what happened to her client.
“The innate desire to cover back up comes out faster than the desire to say ‘let me fix this.’ No one wants to admit — they had nothing to do with it, they weren’t even on the case — but I think the initial reaction is to cover up rather than to just admit.”
I ask the Brooklyn DA and his team: What is more important to you — protecting an already discredited exemployee like Reeves, or delivering justice to yet another man who appears to have been railroaded by your office?
How Gregory Ellis was wronged