THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 19
testified “truthfully” they would not send
him to prison for the January 2nd mug-
ging. Walker testified that he had com-
mitted robberies with Smokes and War-
ren in the past, and repeated his claim
that Smokes had told him that he had
“caught a body.” Smokes and Warren in-
sisted that these claims were untrue. But
prosecutors also relied on four other young
men, who claimed that they had seen
Smokes and Warren at the crime scene.
Smokes knew one of them, but the oth-
ers, he said, were strangers.
The daily papers had covered the
Casse murder, which may have exacer-
bated tensions in the courtroom. The
jury, before delivering its verdict, sent a
message to the judge, saying, “We would
like the Court to know that we did not
come to a decision lightly but with great
emotional turmoil.” They voted to con-
vict both teen-agers of second-degree
murder. After the trial ended, Warren,
in a state of disbelief, remained in his
seat. “I had to tap him and say, ‘Come
on,’” Smokes told me. “It didn’t regis-
ter that he was found guilty.”
The judge, Clifford A. Scott, was
known as one of the toughest judges in
the city, and had embraced the nick-
name Maximum Scott. He sentenced
Smokes to twenty-five years to life in
prison and Warren to fifteen to life. At
their sentencing hearing, Smokes de-
clared, “I have been framed!”
I
n 2005, when Eric Smokes had been
in prison in upstate New York for
eighteen years, he received a letter from
James Walker. When Smokes saw the
name on the envelope, he said, he
thought “it might be a pipe bomb or
something.” But the letter was an apol-
ogy. “I was basically giving the police &
DA what they wanted after I heard what
they was looking for,” Walker wrote.
He added that he had been “strung out
on crack” and “not thinking straight.”
Smokes, with assistance from a friend
in prison, drafted a memo on his case
and sent it, with copies of Walker’s let-
ter, to every lawyer and legal clinic
he thought could help. Two years after
Smokes had been sent to prison, the
Manhattan D.A.’s office had charged
five teen-agers in connection with the
rape of a jogger in Central Park; in 2002,
they were exonerated after a serial rap-
ist confessed to the crime. Smokes’s
memo stated, “Like the suspects in the
Central Park Case, David and Eric’s ar-
rest resulted from police investigation
conducted under public and political
pressure to hold someone responsible.”
No lawyer agreed to take his case.
In 2007, Warren returned to Brook-
lyn. Four years later, Smokes was released.
“When I came home, I said, ‘I got to do
something,’” he told me. “I can’t stand
by idly and just accept the fact that I did
twenty-five years for a crime I didn’t do.”
He eventually found two attorneys, Craig
Phemister and James Henning, who were
willing to take on the case pro bono. The
lawyers tracked down Walker and other
people who had spoken to the police
during the 1987 investigation, including
Kevin Burns and Robert Anthony, two
of the men who said they’d been at the
crime scene. Burns, Anthony, and Walker
all signed affidavits saying that they had
given false testimony under pressure from
law enforcement.
In February, 2017, Phemister and
Henning met with prosecutors in the
Conviction Integrity Program of the
Manhattan D.A.’s office. The District
Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., had estab-
lished the program, in 2010, to prevent
wrongful convictions and to investigate
claims of innocence. Henning, a recent
law-school graduate, explained why he
believed his clients had been wrongly
convicted. The prosecutors from the Con-
viction Integrity Program, he later re-
called, seemed “guarded and defensive.”
One of them had sent him a police re-
port that he’d requested, but when he
asked for other documents the prosecu-
tors refused to share them. “The fact that
they didn’t want to give me anything,
but they wanted everything from me, it
put up red flags for me,” Henning said.
Henning reviewed the Conviction
Integrity Program’s record: it had moved
to vacate few convictions. He also learned
that one of the two prosecutors who had
worked to convict Smokes and Warren
was still in the D.A.’s office. In order to
share evidence with prosecutors, Hen-
ning needed to have a high level of trust
in them. If Vance’s Conviction Integrity
Program reinvestigated the case and ul-
timately decided not to vacate Smokes’s
and Warren’s convictions, Henning wrote
in a letter to the office, “we will be forced
to resort to litigation after having pro-
vided your office with all of our evidence
ahead of time.” Henning decided that
his clients would be better off seeking
justice in the courts.
In the summer of 2017, Henning filed
a motion in New York State Supreme
Court, asking a judge to hold a hearing
on the evidence. The D.A.’s office con-
sented to this. In a recent statement,
Vance’s office said, “We gave careful
consideration to these renewed claims
of innocence when they were presented
to us several years ago. After further re-
view, we determined these claims needed
to be evaluated by a Judge.” (Vance and
others from his office declined to be in-
terviewed for this story.)
In the hearing, Smokes and Warren
would be presumed guilty until proven
innocent; the onus would be on them to
prove the assertions laid out in their mo-
tion. Persuading a judge to vacate a murder
conviction is extraordinarily difficult, and
for Smokes and Warren it promised to
be especially challenging. There was no
DNA evidence, and James Walker would
not be able to testify on their behalf—
not long after Henning had filed his mo-
tion, Walker died, of gunshot wounds. In
the course of the following year, Smokes
and Warren’s hearing turned into a con-
tentious battle that at times seemed to
put the criminal-justice system itself on
trial, revealing disturbing tactics employed
by law enforcement during New York
City’s high-crime years, and also high-
lighting the perils of asking the Manhat-
tan D.A.’s office to investigate itself.
O
n the morning of November 14,
2018, Smokes and Warren walked
into the courthouse at 111 Centre Street,
in Manhattan. Smokes was fifty-one
years old, and Warren was forty-eight.
Both men were heavyset, with tired eyes;
Smokes, who had knee and hip prob-
lems, walked with a limp. Despite many
years in separate prisons, the two had
remained close friends, trading letters
each month. Smokes said, of their shared
predicament, “It’s a marriage for us—
it’s a hell of a bond.” Since coming home,
Smokes had worked in construction,
and Warren did asbestos removal. Both
were married to the women they had
been dating at the time of their arrests.
Around ten o’clock, Judge Stephen
Antignani entered the courtroom and
zipped up his black robe. Smokes and
Warren sat with their lawyers. Henning
