Deportation halted as ‘illegal conviction’ tossed
State attorney helps father falsely charged in ’99 marijuana case
Dwayne Brown, a 44-year-old Central Florida man who immigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica as a teenager, was returning from a wedding in his native country in 2015 when he was detained by immigration officials due to a criminal conviction years earlier, putting him on the path to deportation.
He was spared that fate thanks to an unusual partner in fighting his conviction: Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala.
Though her office typically prosecutes crimes, its Conviction Integrity Unit investigates claims of innocence by those already found guilty.
Brown, Ayala’s team found, had been wrongly prosecuted.
He has since become the first person whose conviction the unit helped reverse.
“For five years, I didn’t sleep,” Brown said between tears at a Thursday news conference in Ayala’s office. “My wife was pregnant with my daughter at the time. We only had one income, so I didn’t know what I was gonna do . ... I want to thank you guys. It still feels like a dream. But I’m
waking up now.”
Brown was days away from being deported to Jamaica over the 1999 conviction when Circuit Judge Tanya Davis Wilson vacated his sentence Jan. 15. That allowed his attorney, Joe ThurdeKoos, to petition the immigration court for a last-minute order to stop the process and allow Brown to remain in the county and apply for citizenship.
ThurdeKoos said he had exhausted all efforts to help the Brown family when he reached out to Ayala’s office for help in 2018. He was surprised to receive a response.
“I’ve always had an impression that the State Attorney’s Office just has one job, which is to put people in jail, to get a conviction,” he said. “But in this case, they did show me they were more interested in getting the case right.”
Brown was working near the cash register of a store in 1999 when Orange County deputies executed a search warrant and found 3.7 grams of cannabis in a “secret compartment” near the register where Brown was standing, court records show.
Although his co-worker was nearby and Brown never confessed to owning the marijuana, he was arrested and charged with possession of cannabis with intent to sell or distribute. Brown later pleaded no contest to a felony charge of “possession of cannabis within 1,000 feet of a church,” which is not a crime unless it’s done with the intent to sell or deliver, Ayala’s office said. There was also no church nearby, prosecutors said.
After being convicted, Brown was placed on two years of probation and ordered to serve 100 hours of community service.
Assistant State Attorney Cindy Schmidt, director of the Conviction Integrity Unit, said the case “should never have been prosecuted.”
“Once Mr. Brown was charged, there were errors throughout the process,” she said at the news conference. “Mr. Brown was arrested for the wrong crime. He pled to a different wrong crime, and he was convicted of a third wrong crime.”
Brown, who immigrated as a teenager to New York on a green card, was detained by immigration officials in 2015 after he returned from a wedding trip in Jamaica. Permanent residents with certain criminal charges are at risk of deportation when attempting to reenter the U.S.
Schmidt and her team found significant problems with Brown’s plea and conviction after “exhaustive research” and joined ThurdeKoos in seeking to vacate the sentence.
“When the facts and the evidence show a harmful error was made or a gross miscarriage of justice has taken place, our office has a unit to seek the truth,” Schmidt said.
One of the most important things the Conviction Integrity Unit can do is change the culture in a criminal justice system that “favors finality over justice,” Ayala said at the news conference.