He was wrongfully imprisoned and helps others fight
Russell Bratton, the other MTA clerk who identified Cooper in a lineup in 1993, said in a 2018 sworn statement that he “just got a glimpse and did not get a good look” at the shooter — and that detectives had told Bratton to cooperate or that he would be a suspect in the killing.
A third witness, Rico Sanchez, testified at the original trial that he saw Cooper running out of the subway station with another man after the gunshot.
“What prosecutors withheld was that [Sanchez] was under arrest for something else,” Thomas Hoffman, Cooper’s defense attorney, said. “They suppressed that for 28 years.”
Sanchez also said in a sworn statement in 2018 that he was pressured by detectives to implicate Cooper in the murder.
“In truth, while I did hear two or three shots, I never saw [Cooper] running away from the train station and jumping into a car,” Sanchez said in the 2018 statement. “That was a claim detectives fed to me.”
Prosecutors admitted in January that Sanchez was facing other charges during Cooper’s original trial, and that it should have been revealed to Cooper’s lawyers at the time. But that does not mean they believe they have the wrong guy.
“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, a spokesman for Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez.
Another wrinkle in the case is that the lead prosecutor at Cooper’s trial in 1993 was Assistant District Attorney Mark Hale, who is now head of the DA’s nationally renowned Conviction Review Unit.
Cooper’s lawyers did not bring his case to the Conviction Review Unit because they didn’t think they would get a fair shake from the office run by the prosecutor who tried the case.
Instead, they brought it straight to a judge in a motion to have the conviction overturned.
A date for the retrial hasn’t been set. Cooper, meanwhile, has taken up life as a stay-at-home husband, cooking salmon and shrimp for the family and taking up hobbies like bowling and golf.
When he has court dates, instead of traveling in a Department of Corrections bus from Ulster Correctional Facility, his wife drives him eight hours from their Raleigh, N.C., apartment to Brooklyn Supreme Court.
“It’s beautiful here. Quiet, peaceful, relaxing. What more can I ask for?” Cooper said about Raleigh.
“We’re happy that he’s free above all,” said Cooper’s wife, Sandy Cooper. “The circumstances are terrible with what happened to his case, but we know that justice is going to prevail.”
He’s paying it forward, prison-style. Jabbar Collins went to jail for 16 years for a 1995 Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, murder he did not commit.
He has been out of prison since 2010
— and now he works as a paralegal helping to turn around other wrongful convictions.
“I came to working on wrongful convictions by necessity,” Collins told the Daily News. “I was wrongfully convicted in 1995. I didn’t have money. There was no way my family could afford to pay for an attorney. My only option was to die in prison or teach myself the law.”
In January, Collins (inset) worked to help Emmanuelle Cooper get his murder conviction tossed by a Brooklyn Supreme Court justice, though prosecutors have decided to retry Cooper for the 1992 slaying of an MTA employee shot dead in an East New York subway station during a token booth robbery by two men. Cooper, 54, spent 27 years in prison for the crime. The two men were friends at Greenhaven Correctional Facility in the 1990s.
“I never got to help him with this case, but when I came home and began to work with a lot of different attorneys, Cooper’s case came across the radar,” said Collins. “I said ‘anything
I can do in the case to help, I will.’ ” Collins, 47, was accused of killing a Williamsburg rabbi, Abraham Pollack, duringarobberyin1995.Heworkedon appeals from prison, and the conviction fell apart when it came out that then-prosecutor Michael Vecchione had allegedly coerced witnesses into falsely testifying, and withheld evidence from the defense at Collins’ trial. The city ended up paying Collins $10 million in a wrongful conviction lawsuit.