18 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
Eric Smokes and David Warren, sentenced as teens, insist that they are innocent.
OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS
BURDEN OF PROOF
Was a pair of 1987 murder convictions based on false testimony?BYJENNIFER GONNERMAN
PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRANDA BARNES
T
here were nearly seventeen hun-
dred murders in New York City in- One of the first occurred about ten
minutes after the ball dropped in Times
Square, when a group of young people
mugged a seventy-one-year-old French
tourist named Jean Casse, on West Fifty-
second Street, outside Ben Benson’s
Steak House. One young man punched
the victim, and one or more rifled
through his pockets. Casse fell, hitting
his head on the sidewalk. He died ten
hours later, at a hospital.
The New York City Police Depart-
ment quickly set up a hotline and an-
nounced that it “desperately” needed
“witnesses of the incident to come for-
ward.” Officers were instructed to ask
anyone arrested for robbery if he had
information about the murder. On the
afternoon of January 2nd, the police
caught four young people mugging a
man on West Forty-seventh Street. The
group included James Walker, a sixteen-
year-old from Brooklyn. While in po-
lice custody, Walker told a detective that
earlier that day he had run into an ac-
quaintance named “Smokey,” who had
said that he’d “caught a body” in Man-
hattan on New Year’s Eve.
Walker went on to identify Eric
Smokes and David Warren, two best
friends who lived in one of Brooklyn’s
poorest neighborhoods, East New York.
Smokes was nineteen, and Warren was
sixteen. They’d each had a minor run-inwith the law: Smokes had been arrested
and fined for shoplifting, and Warren
had been arrested for a mugging. (Wa r -
ren’s case was later dismissed.)
On January 3rd, Smokes and Warren
were questioned separately by detectives,
and both said that they had gone to
Times Square with friends on New Year’s
Eve; a few hundred thousand people
had packed the streets. Smokes and War-
ren had ended up on West Forty-eighth
Street, outside the Latin Quarter, a night
club popular with teen-agers. Warren
recalled, “We didn’t have the funds for
that, so we stood around for a little while”
before heading south. Smokes said that,
around West Thirty-eighth Street, he
“saw some people fighting and saw some
guy that got shot.” When the bullet hit,
feathers flew out of the man’s jacket.
Both Smokes and Warren said repeat-
edly that they had not gone north of
Forty-eighth Street. According to the
police report of Smokes’s interrogation,
“Mr. Smokes states he did not see any
old man get mugged.”
The police released Smokes and War-
ren, but arrested them five days later.
Smokes watched from the back seat of
a police cruiser as detectives brought his
friend out of high school in handcuffs.
“From the point that we got to his school,
the reality of it really hit,” Smokes told
me. “He looked at me as a big brother,
and I looked at him as my little brother,
and there was nothing I could do to help
my little brother.” He added, “I couldn’t
comfort him in no way except to say
that we’re in this together.”
They were sent to Rikers Island, where
they were placed in separate housing units.
“They took me from high school to jail,”
Warren told me. “It was like a dream that
I just couldn’t wake up from.” Six months
passed, and prosecutors offered Warren
various plea deals: if he testified against
Smokes, he would receive a very short
prison sentence. Warren refused. He ex-
plained, “I’m not going to say he did some-
thing I know he didn’t do.”
That summer, Smokes and Warren
were tried for murder in New York State
Supreme Court, in Manhattan. Prosecu-
tors accused Smokes of punching Jean
Casse and Warren of trying to rob him.
The prosecution’s star witness was James
Walker, who had signed a coöperation
agreement with the Manhattan D.A.’s
office; prosecutors promised that if he