deadly New York City shooting, Jonathan Fleming
said he had been more than 1,000 miles away, on a
vacation at Disney World. Despite having
documents to back him up, he was convicted of
murder.
Prosecutors now agree with him, and Fleming left a
Brooklyn court as a free man Tuesday after
spending nearly a quarter-century behind bars. Fleming, now 51, tearfully hugged his lawyers as
relatives cheered, "Thank you, God!" after a judge
dismissed the case. A key witness had recanted,
newly found witnesses implicated someone else
and prosecutors' review of authorities' files turned
up documents supporting Fleming's alibi. "After 25 years, come hug your mother," Patricia
Fleming said, and her only child did. "I feel wonderful," he said afterward. "I've always
had faith. I knew that this day would come
someday.
"
The exoneration, first reported by the Daily News,
comes amid scrutiny of Brooklyn prosecutors'
process for reviewing questionable convictions, scrutiny that comes partly from the new district
attorney, Kenneth Thompson. He said in a
statement that after a months long review, he
decided to drop the case against Fleming because
of "key alibi facts that place Fleming in Florida at the
time of the murder.
" From the start, Fleming told authorities he had been
in Orlando when a friend, Darryl "Black" Rush, was
shot to death in Brooklyn early on Aug. 15, 1989.
Authorities suggested the shooting was motivated
by a dispute over money. Fleming had plane tickets, videos and postcards
from his trip, said his lawyers, Anthony Mayol and
Taylor Koss.
But prosecutors at the time suggested
he could have made a quick round-trip plane jaunt
to be in New York, and a woman testified that she
had seen him shoot Rush. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison and was due to have his first
parole hearing soon. The witness 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 district attorney's office to
review the case last year.
Defense investigators found previously untapped
witnesses who pointed to someone else as the
gunman, the attorneys said, declining to give the
witnesses' or potential suspect's names before
prosecutors look into them. The district attorney's
office declined to comment on its investigative plans.
Prosecutors' review produced a hotel receipt that
Fleming paid in Florida about five hours before the
shooting - a document that police evidently had
found in Fleming's pocket when they arrested him.
Prosecutors also found an October 1989 Orlando
police letter to New York detectives, saying some employees at an Orlando hotel had told
investigators they remembered Fleming.
Neither the receipt nor the police letter had been
provided to Fleming's initial defense lawyer, despite
rules that generally require investigators to turn
over possibly exculpatory material. Patricia Fleming, 71, was with her son in Orlando at
the time of the crime and testified at his trial.
"I knew he didn't do it, because I was there," she
said.
"When they gave my son 25 to life, I thought I
would die in that courtroom." Still, she said, "I never did give up, because I knew
he was innocent." Thompson took office in January, after unseating
longtime District Attorney Charles "Joe" Hynes with
a campaign that focused partly on questionable
convictions on Hynes' watch.
Hynes had created a
special conviction integrity unit to review false-
conviction claims, but some saw the effort as slow- moving and defensive. Thompson has agreed to dismiss the murder
convictions of two men who spent more than 20
years in prison for a triple homicide. He also
dropped his predecessor's appeal challenging the
2013 release of another man who had served 22
years in prison on a questioned murder conviction.
On Tuesday, Jonathan Fleming left court with an
arm around his mother's shoulders and the process
of rebuilding his life ahead of him. Asked about his plans, he said: "I'm going to go eat
dinner with my mother and my family, and I'm
going to live the rest of my life."
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