The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Murder case dropped against man imprisoned for 22 years
NEW YORK » Prosecutors dropped charges Wednesday against a New York man who spent 22 years in prison for a double killing before new witnesses came forward and his conviction was overturned.
The decision came after a judge had already overturned Calvin Buari’s conviction and freed him in May. Newfound witnesses said Buari wasn’t the man who shot two men in a parked car on a Bronx corner in 1992.
The Bronx district attorney’s office initially pledged to appeal and retry the case if necessary, so Buari had remained under indictment until prosecutors abandoned the case Wednesday. Spokeswoman Patrice O’Shaughnessy said prosecutors determined they would be “unable to meet our burden of proof at trial.”
Buari’s lawyer, Oscar Michelen, called the deci- sion “long, long overdue.”
“This weight lifted off of him” when the case was dismissed, Michelen said.
The case against Buari, 47, is about to be explored extensively in a podcast scheduled for release March 28.
Elijah and Salhaddin Harris, who were brothers, were shot to death as they ate a takeout dinner in their car Sept. 10, 1992.
Buari was a crack cocaine distributor in the area, and authorities blamed him for a spasm of bloodshed there. Residents “had every reason to fear for their safety as long as he was free to roam the streets,” thenDistrict Attorney Robert Johnson said after Buari was convicted in the Harris case in 1995. He was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison.
After Buari’s lawyers and family publicized his exoneration effort in recent years, new witnesses came forward. Two told a court last year they saw another man commit the shooting. A third said Buari was chatting with her down the block when the gunfire started.
“Each of these witnesses testified with sincerity, and remorse, at what they perceived to be a miscar- riage of justice,” Bronx state Supreme Court Justice Eugene Oliver wrote in overturning Buari’s conviction last year. The judge didn’t declare Buari innocent but said the new witnesses’ testimony warranted a new trial.
Also, prosecutors’ key witness later confessed to the crime, then recanted. He recently said Buari wasn’t the gunman.
That witness has never been charged in the Harris brothers’ deaths but would be fair game for Buari to discuss at a retrial, the judge wrote.
The podcast, “Empire on Blood,” follows the case through the lens of journalist Steve Fishman, known for his interviews with imprisoned fraudster Bernard Madoff.
Since his release, Buari has started a business transporting inmates’ relatives to prison for visits, but the enduring criminal case had made job- and apartment-hunting difficult, Michelen said.
“Now he can not have this over his head and move on with his life,” the attorney said.