A deceptive photo lineup helped imprison a man for over 18 years for a fatal shooting he did not commit, according to the Brooklyn district attorney, who said Thursday he will ask for that conviction to be vacated.
Sheldon Thomas, 35, was convicted of a 2004 murder in Brooklyn's East Flatbush neighborhood. He was arrested based on a witness identification of a different person with the same name who lived in the same precinct -- a mistake that was first concealed and then explained away during the proceedings, prosecutors said.
A reinvestigation concluded detectives knew they were different people but were intent on arresting the defendant and used the faulty identification procedure as pretext, prosecutors said.
The defendant is scheduled to appear in Brooklyn Supreme Court Thursday afternoon, during which prosecutors will make the motion to vacate the conviction.
"We must strive to ensure fairness and integrity in every case and have the courage to correct mistakes of the past. That is what we are doing in this case, where an extensive reinvestigation by my Conviction Review Unit revealed that it was compromised from the very start by grave errors and lack of probable cause to arrest Mr. Thomas," Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement. "He was further deprived of his due process rights when the prosecution proceeded even after the erroneous identification came to light, making his conviction fundamentally unfair."
Three alleged gang members, including Thomas, were charged with killing 14-year-old Anderson Bercy and wounding another person on Dec. 24, 2004, in East Flatbush. Two guns were used and the shooters were inside a white car. A witness initially identified two men she knew, who did not include Thomas, as being in the car.
According to the district attorney's Conviction Review Unit, detectives obtained a photo of another Sheldon Thomas from a police database and showed an array with that photo to the witness, who identified him as being in the car with 90% certainty. Based on her identification, the detectives went to the defendant's address -- not to the address of the Sheldon Thomas whose photo the witness had identified -- and arrested him.
The defendant denied any involvement in the homicide, but the same witness who identified the other Thomas in the array also identified defendant Thomas in a lineup -- effectively identifying two different people as the perpetrator, prosecutors said. Thomas was then indicted along with the two others.
It wasn't until a pretrial hearing in June 2006 that the array identification of the wrong Thomas came to light. Detective Robert Reedy admitted he falsely testified and the defendant was actually not in the array. Reedy was later disciplined following an investigation by the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau.
Another detective conceded that, when questioned a few days after the murder, the defendant had told them that it wasn't him in the photo array.
Despite these revelations, the judge found that there was probable cause to arrest Thomas based on "verified information from unknown callers" and the fact that he resembled the other Thomas from the photo array. The defendant was convicted of second-degree murder, attempted murder and related counts and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
The Conviction Review Unit recommended vacating the conviction as "the errors undermined the integrity of the entire judicial process and defendant's resulting conviction." Because the evidence was and is defective, the case cannot be retried, and the unit recommended dismissing the underlying indictment.
