THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 21
The couples separated after Smokes
and Warren went to prison, but both
eventually reunited. In 2008, Smokes
and Jenkins were married in the visit-
ing room at Fishkill prison. Warren
and Williams married in 2011. That
year, they had a daughter, Kali, and
Smokes became her godfather. Kali was
now seven and very inquisitive. Each
time Warren came home from court,
she wanted to know what had hap-
pened. “Of course she has questions.
So me, being the parent, I have to an-
swer them truthfully,” he told me. “She’s
a daddy’s girl, so she’s always going to
root for me.”
The hearing continued into the win-
ter, with court dates every few weeks.
On December 20, 2018, Warren testified,
wearing a tan button-down shirt and
no tie. He sat with his hands clasped in
front of him, leaning toward the micro-
phone as if he wanted to make certain
that not a single word was lost.
He spoke about the night his mother
had fetched him at Williams’s apart-
ment, and how George Delgrosso, the
lead detective on the case, had been wait-
ing for him at his home. The detective,
who had not told Warren’s mother that
he was investigating a homicide, took
Warren to the Seventy-fifth Precinct,
where he questioned him without an
adult relative or a lawyer present.
“Do you know whether Detective
Delgrosso knew that you were only six-
teen years old?” Henning asked.
“Yes, he did.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he had a picture of me with
my birth date on it.”
Warren said he had been “scared shit-
less,” and that the detective “seemed to
get angry.” He went on, “Guess that he
was expecting me to tell him something
that I couldn’t tell him. I was telling
him the truth. I guess he didn’t believe
the truth.”
Warren remained composed until
Henning asked him a final question:
“David, why are you seeking to over-
turn your conviction?”
“Why wouldn’t I seek it? I lived with
the stain of being a convicted murderer
for thirty-two years,” he said. “My grand-
father went to his grave thinking I did
this.” Warren paused. “Can I get a min-
ute?” he asked. “I just need a minute.”
Without waiting for the judge to an-
swer, he stepped off the witness stand
and collapsed, sobbing, in a chair on the
side of the courtroom. One of his law-
yers brought him a handkerchief; the
other sat at the defense table, head in
one hand, also in tears. The judge de-
clared a break. Warren remained seated
on the side of the courtroom, his body
heaving with sobs.
After the break, Keenan cross-ex-
amined Warren. In order to get out of
prison, Warren had been required to ap-pear before the state parole board. Pris-
oners almost never receive parole if they
insist they are innocent, so Warren had
said that he was guilty. Keenan asked,
“Do you recall making this statement
to the parole board?” She read from a
piece of paper: “‘A person lost his life,
and I heartily regret that decision.’”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “My mother
was getting, you know, elderly.... I had
to make a decision.” He went on, “At
that point in my life, I was, like,‘Look,
they saying I did it. Just go with it. Go
home to your family.’ That’s how I felt.”
He added, “You had to walk in my shoes
to understand my position.” As Warren
stepped off the witness stand, he looked
spent. He returned to the defense table
and slumped in his chair.
Smokes testified on January 3, 2019,
the thirty-second anniversary of the day
that he and Warren were first questioned
by the police. Smokes spoke about the
degrees he had earned in prison—a
bachelor’s from Mercy College and a
master’s from New York Theological
Seminary—and about how difficult it
had been to find a job with a murder
conviction on his record. His voice qua-
vered when he spoke about his mother,
who had died while he was in prison.
Keenan read aloud from statements
that Smokes had made before the pa-
role board, taking responsibility for the
crime, and insisted that they proved his
guilt. She also suggested that Smokes
was trying to overturn his convictionbecause, if he succeeded, he could file a
lucrative lawsuit against the city.
“So your plan is to sue the city for
monetary damages?” she asked.
“Should I prevail, yes,” Smokes said.
She asked if he was “aware of the
Central Park Five,” and added, “You are
aware of the fact in 2014 they were given
a forty-one-million-dollar settlement
from the city?”
“I know they prevailed,” he said. “I
don’t know the amount.”
As it happened, Smokes’s efforts to
clear his name long preceded that pay-
out. In August of 2010, while he was
still in prison, Smokes had sent a letter
about his case to District Attorney
Vance. He received a reply from Bon-
nie Sard, then the chief of the Convic-
tion Integrity Program. Sard wrote, “The
claims you raise in your letter will un-
dergo a preliminary review and you
should expect to receive a response or
request for additional information within
the next couple of months.”
Smokes’s attorney asked if he had
ever received another letter from the
Conviction Integrity Program.
“No,” Smokes said. “I was looking
for it.”
The judge turned to him. “You didn’t
get it?” he asked.
“No,” Smokes said. “Nothing came.”I
n the summer of 2012, Vance gave a
speech at the New York City Bar As-
sociation titled “The Conscience and
Culture of a Prosecutor.” In the previ-
ous two decades, there had been several
hundred exonerations based on DNA
evidence in the United States. These
exonerations, Vance said, “have shown
all of us that an innocent person can
land in prison, despite the best efforts
of a prosecutor, a judge, and a jury.” In
recent years, an increasing number of
defendants—including those who can-
not rely on DNA—have tried to over-
turn their convictions. According to the
National Registry of Exonerations, there
were a hundred and forty exonerations
in the U.S. in 2019. There are now fifty-
four conviction-review units in D.A.’s
offices across the country, which were
involved in more than a third of last
year’s exonerations.
In his speech, Vance said that, when
he set up the Conviction Integrity Pro-
gram, he’d thought that some prosecutors