“Any bag that can hold all my things becomes too heavy to carry.”was clean-shaven, with short hair and
a crisp suit. Phemister had left the case,
but Pierre Sussman—a veteran attor-
ney who had helped overturn six mur-
der convictions in the past six years—
had taken his place. Christine Keenan,
a longtime prosecutor in the Manhat-
tan D.A.’s office, sat at a table by her-
self, her straight brown hair hanging
partway down her back. The jury box
was empty. Judge Antignani, a former
prosecutor, would decide alone whether
the convictions should stand. Smokes
and Warren were about to live out the
fantasy of anyone who has imagined
challenging a conviction after being in-
carcerated. The people who had sent
them to prison would now have to en-
dure their own cross-examinations.
For thirty years, Smokes had been
trying to figure out why three teen-agers
he didn’t know had testified against him.
On the first day of the hearing, Hen-
ning called one of them, Robert An-
thony, to the witness stand. Henning
asked Anthony to state his age (for-
ty-nine), his last year of schooling (ninth
grade), and his job (truck driver), and
then interrogated him about his role in
the case. At first, Anthony’s answers were
brief, but then he seemed to become
ready to unburden himself. Anthony said
that on New Year’s Eve, 1986, he had
gone to Manhattan with about ten
friends, including two of his cousins. On
West Fifty-second Street, he saw an “old
man lying on the ground” and heard
“people yelling.” He and a cousin later
saw a news report about the incident
and talked about having been at the
scene. Anthony’s mother overheard them
and called the police.
The police questioned Anthony, he
said, for around fourteen hours: “They
kept asking me did I know who did it. I
kept telling them no.” He recalled that
he said no “about fifty or sixty” times.
“They didn’t believe it or whatever. I don’t
know. They just was stuck on one track.”
Anthony said that a detective had
shown him photographs of Smokes and
Warren: “He basically said, ‘Those were
the guys that did it.’” He also claimed
that police had pressured him to coöper-
ate, threatening to turn him into a suspect.
“They said, ‘How about this: You did it.’
I said, ‘I didn’t do anything.’ They said,
‘Yes, well’—basically, in so many words,
‘If they didn’t do it, you did it.’” Anthony
identified Smokes and Warren in a po-
lice lineup. In the hearing, he testified
that those identifications had been a lie.
Anthony said that he had not wanted
to testify at the murder trial: “I didn’t
want to ruin someone’s life over some-
thing they didn’t do.” But the police had
arrested him as a material witness. He
spent the night in the Bronx House ofDetention, then was taken straight to
the courthouse. Henning asked him why
he had lied on the witness stand. An-
thony shook his head. “I mean, basically,
I am sixteen years old,” he said. “Scared.”
He added that, “because of this,” he no
longer had a relationship with his mother.
“She messed up these guys’ life. My life.”
The next person to testify was Kevin
Burns, who had known Smokes since
they were young. Two weeks after the
murder, Burns recalled, police officers
arrested him on an unrelated charge.
While he was in police custody, he saw
that officers had a newspaper with a
story about Smokes’s and Warren’s ar-
rests. Burns blurted out that he had been
on the block when the murder occurred
and had information about it. He later
explained, “I thought it could probably
help my case.” In the month before the
trial, Burns gave prosecutors two differ-
ent versions of the crime. Nevertheless,
they put him on the stand, and he pinned
it on Smokes and Warren.
At the hearing, Burns, who was now
fifty-one and had worked at the De-
partment of Sanitation, testified that he
had not even been in Manhattan that
night. “I didn’t know it was a crime to
lie under oath. I was seventeen, eigh-
teen years old,” he said. “I was doing
what I was expected to do by the D.A.”
He explained that he had hated Smokes
when they were teen-agers, and that he
had once mistakenly shot him with a
pellet gun. When asked why he had de-
cided to testify at the hearing, Burns
became emotional. “Everybody has
something in their life they are ashamed
of doing,” he said. “This is my lie that
I get to rectify from thirty years ago.”S
mokes and Warren never brought
their wives to court, wanting to shield
them from the stress of the hearing.
When the police had gone looking for
Smokes, on January 3, 1987, they’d found
him walking with his girlfriend, Tam-
mie Jenkins, in East New York. Two
officers jumped out of an unmarked
van, Jenkins later testified, and “one
pointed the gun to his head, and the
other one had it at his back.” Warren
lived in the Pink Houses, a public-hous-
ing project, in the same building as his
girlfriend, Kim Williams. When the
police showed up there, later that night,
he was in her apartment.