Turmoil over ’92 slay case Did 27 yrs., cleared, now retrial
A Brooklyn man whose 1993 murder conviction was overturned by a judge in January will be retried for the same crime, prosecutors confirmed to the Daily News Friday.
Emmanuelle Cooper, 54, spent 27 years in prison for the 1992 murder of MTA employee Andres Barretto, who was fatally shot in an East New York subway station after two men forced their way into a booth and robbed the token clerks inside.
Cooper refused to admit guilt for the murder at his sentencing and in two trips to the parole board. He was serving a sentence of 25 years to life.
Cooper, his wife and his family rejoiced in January when Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Ruth Shillingford tossed his conviction on the ground that prosecutors lacked “physical evidence or incriminating statements” against him, and that the case hinged on “the deeply flawed identifications of two token clerks.”
Prosecutors shot back Friday that they are confident enough in their case that they’ll call the MTA token clerks Shillingford doubted as witnesses in a decades-later retrial that could send Cooper back to prison.
“We believe the two eyewitnesses to the murder who identified Mr. Cooper as the shooter were credible then, and after speaking to them again, during our reinvestigation of this case, we believe they remain credible and they are prepared to testify again,” said Oren Yaniv, spokesman for Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez.
“It’s important to remember that an innocent man, Andres Barretto, an MTA worker, lost his life during this robbery,” Yaniv said.
The prosecutor who tried the case in the 1990s, Mark Hale, is now the head of the Brooklyn DA’s Conviction Review Unit.
Cooper’s defense argued that one of the witnesses in the case, a man named Rico Sanchez who was imprisoned at the time of the trial, was wrongly forced by the Brooklyn DA’s office to testify against him. Sanchez claimed he saw Cooper run from the scene and hop in a getaway car.
But Cooper’s lawyers say Sanchez’s statement lacked credibility because prosecutors promised to cut him loose on separate criminal charges in exchange for his testimony.
Prosecutors didn’t know at the time that Sanchez was under arrest in a separate case when he identified Cooper, Yaniv said. Still, he said, the identification itself was solid.
“After acknowledging that the office committed egregious misconduct that deprived Mr. Cooper of a fair trial, resulting in 28 years of wrongful imprisonment, the Kings County District Attorney’s Office has decided to prolong Mr. Cooper’s suffering by putting him through the stress of a trial,” said Tom Hoffman, Cooper’s lawyer. “This decision is made despite overwhelming evidence of Mr. Cooper’s innocence.”
Prosecutors have to turn over all discovery in the case to Cooper’s attorneys by April 5. Cooper is due back in court on May 13.