A Queens judge on Thursday vacated the convictions of three men who spent years in prison for crimes they have long maintained they did not commit.
In one case, Justice Michelle A. Johnson tossed out decades-old convictions against Reginald Cameron and Armond McCloud, who maintained they were both coerced into confessing the 1994 killing of a Japanese exchange student. The Queens district attorney’s office said the confessions included inaccuracies about what happened that also appeared in police reports, and were elicited by a detective connected to other cases involving false confessions — including the later-exonerated teens often called the “Central Park Five.”
In another case, she vacated a conviction against Earl Walters, who the DA’s office said was wrongfully accused of kidnapping and robbing two women in 1992.
In a phone interview after the hearing, McCloud said he felt like his voice had finally been heard.
“These 29 years, I’d be the first to tell you, was not kind for me,” he said. “But I kept it pushing, I kept it moving, and hoped for a better tomorrow.”
After 10,607 days, McCloud said, a “better tomorrow finally came.”
The DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which reviews potentially wrongful convictions, asked Johnson to overturn the convictions after it reinvestigated the cases in partnership with Rutgers University’s New Jersey Innocence Project, Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, the Exoneration Initiative and the Legal Aid Society’s Wrongful Conviction Unit.
“Fairness in the criminal justice system means we must re-evaluate cases when credible new evidence of actual innocence or wrongful conviction emerges,” DA Melinda Katz said in a press release. “Those who have served prison time for crimes they demonstrably did not commit deserve to have their slate wiped clean.”
Units like the one that cleared Cameron, McCloud and Walters have become increasingly common among prosecutors offices’ across the country, as a growing body of evidence has emerged about the combination of human errors and purposeful misconduct that can lead to wrongful convictions. All five New York City DAs have established similar teams, which have moved to overturn hundreds of cases — often because the officers who investigated the cases were accused of wrongdoing.
The Queens DA’s Office said 86 of the 102 convictions it has moved to vacate were based on “unreliable police work.”
The vacated convictions highlight similar issues raised in recent lawsuits filed by other men who served decades in prison for crimes from the 1990s, only to be cleared later. The city spent more than $35 million to settle at least three of those suits last year.
Investigators find evidence of coerced confessions
McCloud and Cameron were arrested in the fatal shooting of Kei Sunada during what was described as a botched robbery in the LeFrak City housing complex in Corona, after a teen told police he had overheard that a pair who went by the same nicknames might have committed the murder, according to court papers filed by the DA’s office. The two, who were 20 and 19 years old at the time, were interrogated for hours without attorneys, the DA’s office said.
McCloud said he ultimately agreed to confess, “because he was thirsty and exhausted, and because he was convinced his innocence would come out in court,” according to the court papers. Cameron also confessed.
But their statements didn’t accurately reflect the evidence at the crime scene, according to the DA’s office. Similar errors appeared in police paperwork completed by one of the detectives who conducted the interrogations — which the Conviction Integrity Unit said could mean the detective had fed the young men a false narrative. The confession included details that “could reasonably be viewed as based on the interrogators’ understanding of the defendants’ criminal history and not the actual facts of the crime,” the DA’s office wrote in its filing.
In 1996, court records show, a jury convicted him of murder, and a judge sentenced him to 25 years to life. McCloud was released on parole in January of this year. His co-defendant, Cameron, spent about eight years in prison after taking a plea deal.
McCloud claimed for years that law enforcement “tricked” him into falsely confessing to the killing, according to court records. He said he was driving with his girlfriend to the Bronx at the time of the shooting and was not at the scene of the crime.
Cameron also believed his confession had been falsely coerced after he said he wanted an attorney, the DA’s office said.
Prosecutors moved to overturn McCloud’s and Cameron’s convictions after consulting with experts on falsely coerced confessions. The detective who interviewed them, Carlos Gonzalez, had also come under scrutiny after judges vacated the convictions of several other men who had confessed during interrogations with Gonzalez: Johnny Hincapie, who was wrongfully convicted for the fatal stabbing of a tourist in 1990, and the exonerated members of the now-famous “Central Park Five,” who have been cleared in the 1989 assault and rape of a Central Park jogger.
The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment on Gonzalez’s conduct. He is no longer with the department.
New fingerprint evidence clears Earl Walters
Walters was 17 years old in 1992 when police interrogated him in connection with a series of carjackings.
At some point during 16 hours of questioning, according to the DA’s office, the teen implicated himself in two recent carjackings involving women who were assaulted and robbed after parking their cars. One of the women also picked Walters out of a lineup, but only after first identifying two other men as the culprits and then speaking with a detective, the DA’s office said.
Police arrested Walters. Meanwhile, according to prosecutors, similar carjackings and robberies of women continued, even while Walters was in custody. Three other men were later charged in those cases, according to the DA’s office.
Walters was convicted in 1994 and spent about two decades in prison before his release in 2013.
The DA’s office launched a new investigation into the case in 2020, with a focus on fingerprints. Investigators tested fingerprint evidence from the carjackings and determined that Walters hadn’t touched the materials, while two of the men who were charged with the other carjackings had.
“There was no evidence that Walters was associated with either of the men,” the DA’s office said in a press release. “He was excluded as a source of any of the forensic evidence in the case.”
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