On Monday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the exoneration of two Black men, both of whom were wrongfully accused of murder and sentenced to decades in prison. A new investigation revealed the culprits behind their false convictions were none other than some crooked cops.
Eight Blocks Apart
The DA’s office asked the court to vacate the convictions of 49-year-old Jabar Walker and 49-year-old Wayne Gardine.
In 1995, Gardine was arrested for shooting a man in Harlem over a dozen times, despite no physical evidence pinning him to the crime. A witness (and local drug dealer) offered information to the police that placed Gardine in the middle of the mess, per Legal Aid Society.
Eight blocks away, on 148th Street and Broadway, two men were shot and killed in a drug-related matter that same year. It wasn’t until two years later that Walker was accused of killing the men after a witness interviewed by the police identified him as the shooter after being shown pictures of him, according to The Innocence Project, which joined the effort to reinvestigate the case.
The “Dirty 30"
The first red flag for both cases was that they were handled by the 30th Precinct of the NYPD, nicknamed the “Dirty 30" because of a scandalous exposé of their corruption which led to the vacating of 125 convictions, per The New York Times.
In the joint reinvestigation of both Walker and Gardine’s cases by The Innocence Project and the DA’s Post-Conviction Justice Unit, it was determined that police corruption was to blame for the false accusations. In Walker’s case, dirty cops pressured the witness into testifying against Walker and threatened retaliation, The Associated Press reported. The testimony was later recanted.
In Gardine’s case, the investigation found that the sole eyewitness (the drug dealer) pinned the murder on Gardine as a petty favor for his drug boss because he was friends with the victim.
Freedom?
Walker walked out of the hearing to vacate his sentence Monday as a free man and into the arms of his family who waited 27 years to be reunited with him.
“You gotta just put in the work. You gotta stay true. You got to put it in and pray,” Walker told reporters outside the courtroom.
However, per the Legal Aid Society, Gardine was immediately placed in immigration detention and faces deportation, as it’s suspected that he entered the country illegally from Jamaica as a teenager.