Three Louisiana men incarcerated for over 28 years were found to have been wrongfully convicted of murder on Wednesday, after newly uncovered evidence linked the original police investigation to a notorious officer found guilty of murder conspiracy and endemic corruption in the New Orleans police department.
Bernell Juluke, Kunta Gable and Leroy Nelson were found guilty of the second-degree murder of Rondell Santinac in 1996, with all three men – who were teenagers at the time of the drive-by shooting in the city’s ninth ward – maintaining their innocence since arrest.
At an emotionally charged post-conviction hearing on Wednesday, prosecutors for the Orleans parish district attorney’s civil rights division presented evidence in court that linked the 1994 murder to disgraced former police officers Len Davis and Sammie Williams. Records revealed the pair were the first officers present at the scene of the shooting.
Prosecutors also unveiled additional evidence of innocence, involving the testimony and credibility of the lone eyewitness to the shooting, which had been withheld from the defense at trial.
Davis, who is currently on federal death row after being convicted on multiple civil rights charges, became a key target in an FBI undercover operation in the mid-90s as it emerged the patrolman was a lead enforcer in a protection racket for city drug dealers operated by corrupt police officers. During the investigation, Davis was recorded on a wiretap commissioning a hit on a woman named Kim Groves, who had filed a brutality complaint against his partner Williams. Groves was murdered less than two months after the Santinac killing.
During the sentencing phase of Davis’s 1996 federal trial, Williams testified that the pair had also provided cover to their criminal associates who they knew had committed murders in the year Santinac and Groves were killed.
On Wednesday, prosecutors told the court that Davis and Williams were the first to arrive on the scene of Santinac’s murder, just two minutes after the shooting and before any of the officers dispatched by 911 operators had arrived. This behavior, they argued, followed a pattern of covering up for the drug dealers they were providing protection for.
“They [Davis and Williams] would go to the scene to make sure they [their criminal associates] were not caught,” said Emily Maw, the chief of the Orleans parish civil rights division. “They would arrive at the scene before the dispatched officers … Given the clear record of that, that came out only weeks after the defendants were tried in this case, it is clear to the state that this is a wrongful conviction.”
Davis was the only officer to provide any description of the alleged assailant and immediately called in a suspect’s name, an alias he associated with Bernell Juluke, according to a joint motion and exhibits filed in the case.
“The state won a conviction against three teenagers that came from the actions of NOPD officers that we knew were actively contributing to the record homicide rate that the residents of this city were suffering through in 1994,” Maw added, as the three men watched proceedings over Zoom from Angola prison and members of their family wept in court.
“The injustice in this case … is further compounded by the fact that for all these years these three defendants have cried out for someone to look into this case and no-one has.”
The three teenagers were arrested just over 20 minutes after the shooting occurred, but no weapons or evidence of firearms were found in their vehicle. They were apprehended 5 miles away from the scene of the crime, and where seven alibi witnesses who testified at trial said they had been at the time the shooting took place.
The state’s prosecution relied almost entirely on the testimony of a single eyewitness named Samuel Raiford, the man driving the car Santinac was shot inside of. Prosecutors disclosed on Wednesday that vital inconsistencies in his account of the shooting had been withheld at trial, as well as evidence relating to his credibility.
Raiford had initially called 911 and reported that the car driven by the assailants was blue, later changing his description during undisclosed grand jury testimony to “wine candy green”. The three teenagers were, however, apprehended in a grey vehicle. The eyewitness had also been accused of perjury in a separate prosecution relating to an attempted burglary just a month before the trial of the three teenagers, but the defense was not told. Raiford had also changed his account of witnessing one of the teenagers, Juluke, in an altercation on the same day of the shooting, which would have supported his alibi.
Raiford could not be contacted for comment on Wednesday.
The DA’s office spent over a year re-examining the shooting and “pulled every single piece of paper on this case we can find”, Maw told the court. The case was taken up by a newly created civil rights team in the DA’s office, tasked with re-examining past harms in the city’s criminal legal system. This included interviewing Len Davis in federal prison, and speaking to five of the jurors in the original trial, who all indicated that the newly discovered evidence would likely have affected the outcome. The jury in the original trial deliberated for over 10 hours.
As Judge Tracey Flemings-Davillier ruled to vacate the three men’s convictions she told them: “You all deserve the utmost apology. Your lives were taken away from you in the manner they were, that should not have happened.”
She added: “It’s painful. It’s painful that it took 28 years to come to this point. But you all are heroes.”
The public benches erupted in spontaneous applause as a large TV screen displaying the three men’s Zoom link from prison was moved to face the assembled families.
Leroy Nelson smiled and waved to his family, offering a brief statement: “I’m thankful for everything that happened and I’m just ready to move on with my life,” he said.
Juluke smiled into the camera and saluted but did not speak.
Outside the courtroom Gable’s two aunts wept and told the Guardian how they had visited their nephew every month for the past 28 years. The 45-year-old lost his mother last year and had not been able to attend the funeral, they said.
“I prayed to God he would come home,” said Elaine Johnson, one of Gable’s aunts. “And God gave us this day.”
The men were released from prison later on Wednesday.
Orleans parish has the highest per capita rate of wrongful convictions anywhere in the United States. Successive district attorneys have come under severe criticism for a pattern of rights violations including so-called Brady violations, meaning withholding of exculpatory evidence to defense counsel.
In 2012 the city’s police force came under a consent decree mandating reforms, which local and statewide officials have recently lobbied to have removed.
