Man cleared of NYC murder after 25 years in prison

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/man-cleared-of-nyc-murder-after-25-years-in-prison/

April 8, 2014

Jonathan Fleming, a man who spent almost a quarter-century behind bars for murder, was freed in New York City on Tuesday and cleared of a killing that happened when he was 1,100 miles away on a Disney World vacation.

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Defense attorneys and prosecutors asked a Brooklyn judge to dismiss Fleming's conviction in the 1989 shooting. A key eyewitness recanted, new witnesses have implicated someone else and a review by prosecutors turned up a hotel receipt putting Fleming in Florida hours before the killing, defense lawyers Anthony Mayol and Taylor Koss said.

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Fleming had plane tickets, videos and postcards from his trip, his lawyers said, but authorities suggested he could have been in New York at the actual time of the shooting, and a woman testified that she had seen him shoot Rush.

The eyewitness recanted her testimony soon after Fleming's 1990 conviction, saying she had lied so police would cut her loose for an unrelated arrest, but Fleming lost his appeals.

The defense asked the DA's office to review the case last year.

Defense investigators found previously untapped witnesses who implicated someone else as the gunman, the attorneys said, declining to give the witnesses' or potential suspect's names before prosecutors investigate them.

And prosecutors' review produced a hotel receipt that Fleming paid in Florida about five hours before the shooting - a document that police evidently had since they found it in Fleming's pocket while arresting him, Mayol and Koss said.

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The exoneration, first reported by the New York Daily News, comes amid scrutiny of Brooklyn prosecutors' process for reviewing questionable convictions.

District Attorney Kenneth Thompson took office in January. In February, his office agreed to dismiss the murder convictions of two men who had spent more than 20 years in prison for three killings, saying newly discovered evidence had raised substantial doubts about their guilt.