Jabar Walker was exonerated today in Manhattan after more than a quarter century of wrongful conviction and incarceration for a double homicide he did not commit. The exoneration came after a joint reinvestigation by the Innocence Project and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s Post-Conviction Justice Unit revealed new evidence of Mr. Walker’s innocence.
Mr. Walker was convicted in the 1995 murders of Ismael De La Cruz and William Santana Guzman on 148th Street in Manhattan, following an investigation by officers from New York Police Department’s 30th Precinct. The precinct was known at the time as the “Dirty 30” due to widespread corruption amongst its officers.
Misconduct in the precinct was so rampant that an investigation by the Mollen Commission, formed by New York City to investigate allegations of NYPD corruption, resulted in the arrest of 33 officers — a staggering one-sixth of the precinct — in the 1990s. The Mollen Commission found that officers in the “Dirty 30” routinely engaged in perjury, record falsification, thefts during searches and seizures, and distribution of narcotics.
The Innocence Project and Post-Conviction Justice Unit’s joint re-investigation revealed police from the precinct pressured a witness, John Mobley, to incriminate Mr. Walker by falsely saying that Mr. Walker had admitted to the crime. Police questioned Mr. Mobley, showing him photos of other crime scenes and implied that they would charge him with those homicides if he did not cooperate. On the day of Mr. Walker’s sentencing in 1998, Mr. Mobley went to Mr. Walker’s attorney’s office seeking to recant that testimony — and has recanted his testimony under oath a number of times since.
Further new evidence of Mr. Walker’s innocence includes the fact that the prosecution’s sole eyewitness to identify Mr. Walker as the assailant, Vanessa Vigo, misidentified another innocent man in a different neighborhood shooting and received monetary benefits in connection with her testimony against Mr. Walker. Ms. Vigo’s account of the shooting was riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and key facts in her account changed from the time of her first conversation with police to the trial. Another eyewitness to the shooting who was familiar with Mr. Walker is adamant that he is not the person he saw committing the crime.
“We thank DA Bragg’s Post-Conviction Justice Unit for a truly collaborative and transparent joint-reinvestigation, which stands as a model for how post-conviction innocence claims can and should be investigated in a non-adversarial process. The joint re-investigation, guided by a commitment to transparency and the ascertainment of truth, revealed a myriad of ways where the system failed Mr. Walker, and uncovered pervasive misconduct that led to his wrongful conviction and new evidence of what he has stated all along — he is innocent. He has now spent more than half of his life in prison for a crime he did not do,” said Vanessa Potkin, Innocence Project’s director of special litigation.
Hellbound and Down 