Black Man Exonerated Of $550 Robbery After Serving 19 Years

It’s never a happy story when a Black man is exonerated and freed from prison after spending years and even decades behind bars for a crime they didn’t commit. It’s a story that’s a better story than the alternative — the man remaining in prison while innocent — but it’s still a story about injustice, rather than justice at last, because those stolen years can’t be returned, and the trauma caused can never be reversed fully.

Kenneth Windley, a 61-year-old New Yorker who spent nearly two decades in prison over a roughly $550 robbery he was exonerated of on Monday, doesn’t have a happy story of justice to tell. His story is one we have heard all too often, by people who have been freed from a hell they should never have been subjected to in the first place.

“It cost me 20 years, but they said they corrected it now. So that’s all that matters. So I’m good with that,” Windley said as he left a Brooklyn courthouse, free for the first time since 2007, 19 years before his exoneration, according to ABC News.

In fact, the case against Windley was so thin and absurd that his conviction was thrown out at the request of both his attorneys and prosecutors, the latter of whom said new evidence,  including confessions from two other men who were convicted of similar robberies, indicated he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

“This case is really a cautionary tale of how things can seem one way but, without careful analysis, not be what it purports to be,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said outside the courthouse. “Had we known what the evidence was, this case should have never happened.”

So, let’s take a look at the so-called evidence that kept Windley in lockup for 19 years.

From ABC:

Windley was arrested in 2005, after buying a stove for his mother with a money order that turned out to be stolen.

It had been snatched from Gerald Ross, 70, by two thieves who followed him home from a trip to a bank and a post office. The thieves put Ross in a chokehold and took money orders, cash, and a bank book from him, prosecutors said in a report released Monday.

Ross regularly got money orders for his rent and life insurance payments at that post office, which helped him and authorities follow a paper trail after the robbery. The trail soon led to Windley, who had given his name, driver’s license and address when purchasing the stove at an appliance store.

From the start, Windley said he had nothing to do with the robbery. He said he’d simply bought a $542.77 money order at a discount from a couple of acquaintances, who insisted that it was valid but that they couldn’t use it for a bureaucratic reason.

“He was duped,” one of Windley’s lawyers, David Shanies, told the court Monday.

Ross identified Windley in a lineup as one of the thieves, and a jury convicted him in 2007 of robbery. Because of prior felony convictions, he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. His appeals failed.

So, Windley had already served almost the entirety of his minimum sentence before it was finally decided that something was amiss. According to the DA’s own report, Windley cooperated with prosecutors from the start, telling them everything he knew about the men who sold him the money order, including their nicknames and legal names, or as much as he knew of them.  After he was convicted, a friend of his had private investigators help flesh out the identities of the men who actually committed the robbery, and persuade them to come forward, which they did, saying in sworn statements and in interviews with DA’s office that they had robbed Ross together and that Windley was not involved.

Of course, no new charges will be brought in this case, as the victim has since died, and the statute of limitations is up for re-prosecuting the crime.

Mind you, no one should be locked up for life for stealing just over $500 worth of goods in the first place, and the fact that Windley was innocent of the crime, only further highlights the flaws in our so-called justice system, in which Black people suffer the most.

If only the system were as eager to compensate those who were imprisoned unjustly as it is to railroad them. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Hopefully, that won’t be the case for Kenneth Windley. For now, though, at least he’s free.

SEE ALSO:

Exonerated Man Calvin Duncan Wins New Orleans Criminal Clerk Election

Black Man Who Spent Decades On Death Row Has Case Dismissed

Black Man Exonerated Of $550 Robbery After 19 Years In Prison was originally published on newsone.com