A man had strong words outside of the Bronx Hall of Justice when he was exonerated 28 years after ‘one of the worst’ wrongful convictions in history.
Antonio Mallet, 54, spent 28 years behind bars after New York City police officers arrested him in connection to a 1996 murder-robbery.
Mallet maintained his innocence and was finally exonerated by Judge Alvin Yearwood on Thursday.
He told lohud.com outside of the courtroom: ‘I’m definitely going to get some accountability. I’m not stopping here, you understand?’
Mallet was accompanied by his attorneys including David Shanies who vowed the fight wasn’t over and they would continue seeking answers on how such a tragic failure of justice was able to take place.
Antonio Mallet, 54, spent 28 years behind bars after New York City police officers arrested him in connection to a 1996 murder-robbery
Mallet maintained his innocence and was finally exonerated by Judge Alvin Yearwood on Thursday
Mallet was accompanied his attorneys including David Shanies (left) who vowed the fight wasn’t over and they would continue getting answers such as how this was able to happen
The saga began in 1996, when Michael Ledeatte was shot and killed in the Bronx after a stolen car sale went wrong.
His acquaintance Gregory Walker was around 140 feet from the Lex GS 300 Ledeatte was driving when he witnessed two people approach the car and shoot Ledeatte.
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After police arrived on the scene, they proceeded to interrogate Walker for over 19 hours, which led to the identification of Mallet as the shooter, according to legal documents recently prepared by the team of attorneys handling Mallet’s wrongful conviction case.
This identification was the primary piece of evidence that led to Mallet’s 1999 guilty conviction – which had even the original judge scratching his head on its credibility even though he declined to throw out the verdict.
Other questionable instances in this case were found in the written statement by Walker during his interrogation.
Walker wrote that Mallet shot Ledeatte twice in the head, but the man had only been shot once – which stemmed from police allegedly being told wrong information from an emergency room doctor after mistaking an entry and exit wound for two separate bullet holes.
Even though Walker was present at the crime, this misremembering of details suggests Walker may have been coached by police to accept this as fact, according to Mallet’s attorneys.
This began in 1996, when Michael Ledeatte was shot and killed in the Bronx after a stolen car sale went wrong. His acquaintance Gregory Walker was around 140 feet from the Lex GS 300 Ledeatte was driving when he witnessed two people approach the car and shoot Ledeatte
After police arrived on the scene, they proceeded to interrogate Walker for over 19 hours which led to the identification of Mallet as the shooter, legal documents recently prepared by the team of attorneys handling Mallet’s wrongful conviction case
Mallet was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, but continued to seek justice.
Until Mallet’s release on parole in 2019, his team submitted around a dozen separate legal challenges – but all of them were rejected.
The now-Bronx district attorney Darcel Clark was one of the judges who threw out his petition.
Her spokeswoman Patrice O’Shaughnessy told lohud.com the evidence presented to Westchester County was never brought to Clark’s desk when she was overseeing his case.
Yearwood was the catalyst for the overturning of Mallet’s conviction after the judge heard his most recent petition and assigned the case to the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office.
A legal brief from the Westchester’s Conviction Review Unit noted that after Walker gave five statements and experienced hours of interrogation where police threatened that a lack of an identifiable suspect could lead ‘police to conclude that he was the killer,’ he identified Mallet.
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Until Mallet’s release on parole in 2019, his team submitted around a dozen separate legal challenges but all of them were rejected. The now-Bronx district attorney Darcel Clark (center) was one of the judge who threw out his petition
Yearwood (center) was the catalyst for the overturning of Mallet’s conviction after the judge heard his most recent petition and he assigned it to the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office
Mallet said: ‘They need to be held accountable and I’m sure other people will step forward and say they did this to them too.’
Joseph Nieves was the lead detective on this case. He acknowledge that the pressure on Walker during the interrogation ‘with the threat of becoming a suspect’ is what led the man to implicate Mallet.
There’s also been other cases of misconduct on Nieves end.
The Conviction Review Unit obtained Nieves disciplinary record. One incident described the detective hijacking a business owner’s video store to sell counterfeit videos.
He was arrested after the NYPD investigated and deemed the claim ‘partially substantiated’, according to Mallet’s attorneys.
These misconduct incidents weren’t turned over to Mallet’s attorneys at the 1999 trial.
Renowned civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby called this conviction one of the worst he had seen and described the detectives as ‘dirty cops’ at the time of Mallet’s arrest.