James Walker - Perjury / False ID / Perjury / False Accusation

Walker, James; murder; NRE mistaken witness identification, perjury/false accusation, prosecutor misconduct, police officer misconduct, withheld exculpatory evidence, knowingly permitting perjury, prosecutor lied in court

N4 [25] "Mr. Walker was identified by a drug addict several months after the crime as the person who assaulted a guard at a check cashing store during a robbery in which another victim was killed. After the conviction of Walker for felony murder, Walker learned that the addict-informer had identified another person as one of the participants in the crime -- which had to have been a lie because that other person was in jail at the time of the robbery. The defense was never told that the informer had wrongly accused someone else. Further, Walker was not told that the man whom he was accused of beating had not identified him in a lineup, but rather selected a filler who was a police officer."

[43] "After a man was killed in the course of a robbery, rewards were offered for information. A drug addict came forward and implicated Walker. Based on this testimony alone, Walker was convicted. The prosecutor and the lead detective suppressed the fact that the informer had implicated a second man, a friend of Walker who was in jail at the time of the crime, and that a surviving victim had seen Walker in a line-up but selected someone else. Walker was exonerated after serving 19 years in prison."

"Damage Suit Against City Reinstated: $11 Million Demanded for Improper Conviction," Cerisse Anderson, New York Law Journal, 9/9/92

"Although the prosecution had documents showing that an informant who named Mr. Walker as a participant in the crime had lied about other details of the robbery and that a truck guard who had been assaulted failed to identify Mr. Walker in a lineup, the exculpatory evidence was never turned over to the defense. Mr. Walker only learned of the exculpatory documents years after his conviction.

"Also, the lead prosecutor of the case for then-[DA] Eugene Gold, J. Paul Zsuffa, appeared as a witness in a pretrial hearing and denied that the lineup with the truck guard had ever taken place."

from NRE synopsis (by Maurice Possley):

"On June 1, 1970, William Powell and an accomplice robbed an armored truck outside of a check-cashing business on Fulton Street in Brooklyn...Powell fatally shot the truck's driver, 40-year-old Edward Kargman. Powell's accomplice knocked a guard, Jose Ruiz, unconscious with a sawed-off shotgun.

"Powell was arrested not long after the crime and ultimately pled guilty to murder.

"Nearly a year after the murder, a drug addict and convicted felon named John Snider, in an apparent attempt to cash in on a reward offered by Kargman's widow, told authorities that Powell had two accomplices, both of whom he knew. Snider said the man with the shotgun was 30-year-old James Walker. The other accomplice, Snider said, was Melvin Givens.

"On April 23, 1971, Walker was arrested and put in a lineup where Ruiz not only failed to identify him, but selected a police officer who was acting as a filler in the lineup.

"The case took another hit when the lead detective, Robert Powell, and the prosecutor on the case, Paul Zsuffa, discovered that Givens was in jail on Rikers Island on the day of the crime.

"Nonetheless, in June 1971, Snider went before a grand jury, where he identified Walker and made no mention of Givens. Walker was then indicted.

"At a pre-trial hearing, Detective Powell and Zsuffa both testified. Powell said he could not recall if Walker was ever in a lineup, and Zsuffa denied there had ever been a lineup.

"Walker went on trial before a jury in [Brooklyn] in October 1971. The prosecution did not disclose the information about Givens, nor did they disclose that Ruiz had identified the wrong man in the lineup.

"Snider and Ruiz both testified and identified Walker as Powell's partner in the robbery and murder. Powell was called as a witness and testified that Walker was not with him during the crime, but he declined to identify his partner by name.

"On October 19, 1971, the jury convicted Walker..."

"While being held in the Brooklyn House of Detention before and during his trial, Walker met Susan Yankowitz, an award-winning playwright and novelist who was putting on a play behind bars with prisoners doing the acting. Walker played a part in the play (about a ghetto preacher) and afterward, he told Yankowitz he was innocent and asked if he could write to her. That led to a correspondence that lasted for the next two decades and ultimately to Walker's freedom. During his years in prison, Walker's wife, mother, father and brother all died.

"Seventeen years after they first met, Yankowitz went to visit Walker in prison for the first time since they had worked on the play together in the Brooklyn House of Detention. Yankowitz was so moved by seeing Walker again that she soon found herself describing his case over dinner to a friend's husband, attorney Douglas Liebhafsky.

"Liebhafsky spent the next two years working pro bono on Walker's case. He discovered how the prosecutor and detective had hidden exculpatory evidence and how Zsuffa had lied during the pre-trial hearing and allowed Ruiz and Snider to give false testimony at Walker's trial.

"In January 1990, Liebhafsky moved for an order vacating Walker's conviction. On June 27, 1990, the [Brooklyn DA's] Office agreed not to oppose the motion and the conviction was vacated. The case was dismissed and Walker was released.

"Liebhafsky later filed a federal wrongful conviction lawsuit against the city of New York on Walker's behalf. The lawsuit was settled in 1993 for $3.5 million."

[All emphases added unless otherwise noted.]