A KILLER TWIST Convict in 2003 case gets glimmer of hope
A Brooklyn judge ordered a new hearing Tuesday reexamining the 2005 conviction of a man in the killing of a college football player, the latest twist in a controversial case.
John Giuca, 36, along with co-defendant Antonio Russo, was convicted of the 2003 late-night slaying of Fairfield University’s Mark Fisher in Prospect Park South, a few blocks from Giuca’s home, after the three spent the night partying in Manhattan. Giuca and Russo, 33, who already knew each other, had never met the 19-year-old student before.
But Brooklyn Judge Danny Chun — who rejected a 2015 motion by Giuca to have his case tossed — ruled that a recently uncovered tape in which one witness seemingly exculpates Giuca necessitated a new hearing.
“I am ordering a hearing to determine whether or not the people either suppressed, or failed, or did not turn over the tape in question,” Chun said during a Skype court conference Tuesday. “The district attorney’s office is not conceding that the people either suppressed or failed to turn over the tape in question.”
The tape in question is a 2005 recording of Rikers inmate Joseph Ingram, who allegedly told Brooklyn prosecutor Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi that Russo confessed to him that he fatally shot Fisher. After killing him, Russo went to Giuca’s nearby home and asked him to dispose of the murder weapon, which Giuca refused to do, according to Ingram’s statement.
But that statement — released in 2018 by prosecutors — was never given to Giuca’s lawyers for trial in 2005, said Giuca’s lawyer Mark Bederow.
Because of the volume of material in the trial, former prosecutor Nicolazzi said she could not be sure whether or not she turned over the Ingram tape.
“I cannot say with any certainty whether or not, either prior to or during the defendant’s trial, I provided … an audiotape or transcript of Ingram’s statement,” Nicolazzi said in a 2019 sworn statement.
The Brooklyn DA’s office argued that the statement by Ingram was inadmissible hearsay that would not have changed the verdict at trial if it was admitted. They also said that Russo made other statements to other witnesses that show Giuca’s guilt.
Even before the new tape was released, attorneys for Giuca argued that Nicolazzi withheld crucial information about witnesses at trial, and they hope to call her as the main witness at the new hearing.
The hearing marks the latest twist in the case that has wound through nearly every level of the state’s courthouse bureaucracy since Giuca’s conviction.
His case was the first to be reviewed by the Brooklyn district attorney’s conviction review unit in 2014, but prosecutors stuck by the conviction at the time.
In 2015, Giuca made a motion to have his conviction thrown out and Judge Chun rejected it in 2016. Then, in 2018, a unanimous appellate court ordered a new trial for Giuca in the case, but that decision was overturned by the state’s highest court in 2019, reaffirming Giuca’s conviction.