A Murder 'Solved' in 4 Hours Sent the Wrong Man to Prison for 23 Years
Source: New York Times
A Murder ‘Solved’ in 4 Hours Sent the Wrong Man to Prison for 23 Years
Grant Williams, whose conviction was overturned on Thursday, told people in prison that they would one day see that he was innocent. “And today’s that day,” he said.
By Jonah E. Bromwich and Arielle Dollinger
July 22, 2021
It was around 6 p.m. on Good Friday in April 1996, and Shdell Lewis was walking with a close friend outside his home in Staten Island when a gunman wearing a black jacket and a Wu-Tang Clan hat walked past, turned around and opened fire. Mr. Lewis was hit several times, collapsed nearby and later died at a hospital.
Within hours, the police had identified Grant Williams, then 25, as his killer.
Mr. Williams was arrested soon after, convicted in 1997 and sentenced to life in prison, where he spent 23 years — all for a crime he did not commit.
On Thursday, a Richmond County judge vacated Mr. Williams’s conviction, after a review of the case identified a number of witnesses who did not testify at the trial, two of whom were essential in proving Mr. Williams’s innocence.
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The exoneration of Mr. Williams follows a string of similar reversals in New York City, which have cast a harsh light on policing and prosecutorial practices that imprisoned innocent people for decades. His arrest and conviction came at a time when the police, struggling to contain New York’s gang wars and a devastatingly high murder rate in the 1990s, could often cut corners in their search for suspects.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/nyregion/grant-williams.html
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Gets my blood boiling almost more than anything else. And any witness, police officer, lawyer, judge, or other government official found to have participated in purposefully railroading someone for whatever purpose - monetary or otherwise - should have the harshest penalty applied to them. 
This is where someone says “tell us how you really feel”
