N.Y. JUDGE RELEASES THREE MEN IMPRISONED 24 YEARS FOR SLAYINGS

Says evidence that could have cleared them was withheld

Three men convicted of murdering an off-duty police officer and a business owner nearly 25 years ago were released from prison Friday after a judge declared they were wrongfully convicted because evidence that may have exonerated them was “deliberately withheld” from their lawyers.

The arrests in 1996 of George Bell, Rohan Bolt and Gary Johnson were heralded by then-new York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had vowed days before their apprehension that justice would be served swiftly. But on Friday, Queens County Supreme Court Judge Joseph Zayas said the prosecutors who secured their convictions had suppressed information “that others may have committed these crimes.”

Speaking via video from Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison north of New York City, the three men thanked those who worked to earn their freedom.

“After I was convicted for capital murder, I couldn’t fathom or wrap my mind around how God would allow the justice system I believed in to fail me in such a tragic fashion,” said Bell, who confessed to authorities in connection with the shooting deaths of New York Police Officer Charles Davis and another man, Ira Epstein, whose check-cashing store in Queens was robbed the morning of Dec. 21, 1996.

Although Bell and Johnson, then 19 and 22 years old, both confessed, they had been “subject to coercive interrogations” and their statements “bear all the hallmarks of the false confessions that resulted in wrongful convictions in the past,” according to a motion filed earlier Friday by private attorneys and public defenders involved in the effort to overturn their convictions.

At the time of the crimes, Bell had a job stocking shelves at an Old Navy and Johnson was a store clerk. They did not have criminal records, nor did they know Bolt, who authorities alleged was their accomplice in the botched robbery.

Bell gave a confession “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, a product of the fact that its details were fed to him by detectives who were working with incomplete and faulty information,” the attorneys wrote.

Bolt, 35 at the time and a father of four who owned a Caribbean restaurant, never confessed, and maintained his innocence. He was arrested based on an identification from a purported witness with a history of drug use and “no known connection to the crime,” according to the court filing detailing the case’s history.

New York City Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch issued a blistering statement, however, saying Davis’s family is “devastated by the possibility that nobody will be held accountable for his murder.”

“There is absolutely no reason that these convicted cop-killers should be put back on the street,” Lynch said in the statement, arguing that if Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz “does not believe there is sufficient evidence of their innocence,” the suspects should stay in prison while the matter is evaluated.