Freedom, for Alan Newton, definitely was not free. It cost the 52-year-old New York native 22 years of his life, and even today he’s trying to pay off remainders and lingering interest from a series of events that landed him in prison in 1984 and kept him there for decades.
Newton was proven innocent and released in 2006, thanks in part to the work of the Innocence Project, a national nonprofit organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners through the use of DNA testing.
Speaking to a group of more than 125 students, faculty and residents at Monmouth University’s Bey Hall on Sept. 13, Newton and Innocence Project Publications Manager Elizabeth Webster explained the work of the Innocence Project, and why Newton’s case exemplifies a number of problems currently facing the American justice system.
“You may have heard the statistic that 2.3 million people are incarcerated,” said Webster.
“If we took one percent of those 2.3 million — which even prosecutors will tell you is the base of what they think the number of wrongful convictions is in this country — that would be over 20,000 innocent people in prison. And estimates based on research are [closer to] three to five percent, so now we’re talking about a sizable problem.”
Since its inception in 1992, the Innocence Project has worked to exonerate 297 prisoners, 17 of whom had been on death row.
Newton, one of the lucky 297, was sentenced to up to 40 years for rape, robbery and assault. According to the Innocence Project’s synopsis of his case, Newton spent the night of June 22, 1984 watching “Ghostbusters” with his family in Brooklyn, then went to his fiancé’s house in Queens to spend the night. At about 4 a.m. on June 23, a 25-yearold woman was abducted, assaulted, raped and slashed with a razor in the Bronx. While recovering in the hospital with a blinded left eye, police presented her with a portfolio containing nearly 200 photographs of former offenders and asked her to identify her attacker. She selected a photo of Newton, which was taken five years earlier when he had been charged with a minor fighting offense at the age of 17.
He was brought in for a lineup and the victim, whom Newton said he had never met before, picked him out.
Bail was set at $200,000, said Newton, and as a telephone company employee, he couldn’t afford to post bond and spent the next year in jail awaiting trial. Because DNA testing was still largely unheard of at the time, the evidence against him consisted primarily of witness testimony, which Newton said was inconsistent and often contradictory. His family testified and corroborated his alibi, but in the end, Newton was found guilty.
“I always believed it was my ignorance of the law that got me convicted, because I didn’t know the right questions to ask,” he said. “So I started asking the right questions.”
Throughout the next 21 years, Newton filed motion after motion, petition after request after appeal, trying to gain access to biological evidence that might prove his innocence.
In 1988, Newton said he petitioned a Bronx court to grant him access to the victim’s rape kit.
The medical examiner’s office granted his request, examined the kit, and told him it did not contain any sperm, the biological material he was hoping to test against his own.
Six years later, he tried again, becoming one of the first New York prisoners to file for DNA testing under a 1994 state law, which allowed all prisoners to do so. But now, to Newton’s dismay, he was told by the New York Police Department’s Property Clerk Division that the rape kit was missing.
“They couldn’t find it. It disappeared,” he said. “So two years later, I filed another request to find the kit and I started getting excuses. It might have gotten burned up in a fire, they said. We can’t find the paperwork. All types of different excuses.”
Undaunted, Newton continued to file motions to try to locate the kit.
“Every year after that, I put a petition in the court, and I got depressed every time my motions got denied. But the thing about New York state is they have a law that states you can file petitions 10, 20, 30 years after you are in jail, which was one of the only things that gave me hope.” In 2004, on the verge of giving up, Newton and his family reached out to the Innocence Project. Webster said the particulars of his case made it ideal for the organization to take on, even if there didn’t seem to be much hope left.
“Alan’s case was ripe,” she said. “It was stranger rape, with a rape kit, so there was DNA available.
“But what Alan went through was one of the worst in that we were very close to having to just close that case,” she added. “He’d been told five or six times that they didn’t have his evidence. It’s not unheard of that we will be looking for evidence for years and years or even decades.” Nevertheless, the Innocence Project got to work. “They wrote a letter to the police department and said, let’s find this man’s evidence once and for all and bring this case to a close,” said Newton.
In 2005, at the request of the Innocence Project, the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office initiated a search within the Property Clerk Division for the rape kit.
That November, after a physical search of evidence barrels in an evidence warehouse in Queens, the kit was found. It was in the same barrel, according to Innocence Project records, that was indicated on the original evidence voucher.
Material from the kit, along with new DNA samples taken from Newton, were sent to the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which conclusively ruled out Newton as a possible suspect in the rape. The Innocence Project and the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office filed a joint motion to vacate Newton’s conviction, and on July 6, 2006, Alan Newton was a free man.
Newton, who been turned down for parole numerous times throughout his 22 years in jail because he wouldn’t confess to the crime, said it was his family that kept him from throwing in the towel during his bleakest moments.
“At one time, I told my family I might have to change my strategy to come home,” he said. “I was talking about accepting responsibility for a crime I didn’t commit, to try and give myself a better chance at the parole board. They said no way.
“I said, ‘I’m the one doing this time.’ And they said ‘no, we’re all doing this time with you.’ ”
After regaining his freedom and remembering the lack of knowledge that he blamed for being unjustly imprisoned in the first place, Newton went back to school.
“I did not want to be ignorant anymore,” he said.
Building upon the course of study he had begun in prison, he earned a Bachelor of Science Degree from Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn in two years. Since then, he has taken the LSAT exams and plans to apply to law school next year.
As for the Innocence Project, Webster said that in addition to reviewing more than 3,000 letters a year from convicts requesting assistance and working to help those chosen through the DNA testing process, the organization is also focused on eliminating the causes of unjust imprisonment.
Innocence Project policy workers are working in tandem with legislators and government officials, she said, in an effort to improve everything from police lineup procedures to forensic science standards and regulations in order to more easily exonerate the innocent and hopefully prevent more people from being wrongly convicted in the future.
“About half the states don’t have any laws saying that you have to maintain or preserve biological evidence,” she said. “That’s something that we are working on in New York state and nationwide. … With DNA, you can get it off the shelf 35 years later and prove somebody innocent. So evidence must be treated with care.”
Another Innocence Project initiative is an attempt to establish fair compensation legislation for all exonerees once they are released from prison.
“Deprived for years of family and friends and the ability to establish oneself professionally, the nightmare does not end upon release,” reads the organization’s website. “With no money, housing, transportation, health services or insurance, and a criminal record that is rarely cleared despite innocence, the punishment lingers long after innocence has been proven.”
Exonerees, according to the organization, also need money for legal services such as attempting to obtain public benefits, expunge criminal records and regain custody of children.
In 2010, Newton filed a successful civil suit against the city of New York and the police department and was awarded $18.5 million in compensation by a jury, which found that the city had violated his constitutional rights and police officials involved in his case were liable for emotional distress when he was continually denied access to evidence that could have proven his innocence many years earlier.
In May 2011, however, a federal judge overturned the jury’s ruling, stating that Newton’s lawyers failed to prove that any city employees intentionally withheld evidence or violated his right to due process.
“Part of their argument is that, because I was exonerated on DNA evidence, it shows the system works,” Newton said.
Newton said he has appealed the judge’s decision and the matter is still unresolved.