Paul Bass Photo
Public defender Joe Lopez (left) & prosecutor Dearington (right).
A simmering dispute between city cops and state prosecutors surfaced in an arraignment court, as New Haven State’s Attorney Mike Dearington convinced a judge to drop a case against a man arrested for murder.
Dearington’s unusual appearance and plea — coupled with criticism of the police and a revelation of a pre-arrest disagreement — occurred shortly after noon in Courtroom B of the Elm Street superior courthouse.
The appearance took place 17 hours after police arrested a 21-year-old man on Henry Street and charged him with shooting 17-year-old Vashun Lewis to death on at 231 Goffe St. on April 16.
They arrested the suspect based on probable cause, but without a state warrant. Because Dearington refused to sign off on one.
Dearington told Judge Bruce Thompson that his office had repeatedly told New Haven police not to make the arrest. He said he most recently told the police that at 4 p.m. Wednesday. “Again we advised to not arrest this person” and vowed not to prosecute the case, Dearington said.
“In the last two or three discussions about a warrant, we repeated that additional work be done on the case before we would sign the warrant,” Dearington told the judge.He said he his attorneys wanted more time to consider eyewitness testimony before signing off on a warrant. “This case is not prosecutable.”
Judge Thompson granted Dearington’s request to dismiss the murder charge against the suspect without prejudice. That means the state can charge the suspect again on the same charge in the future. The suspect’s attorney, public defender Joe Lopez, asked the judge to hold off on deciding whether or not to rule with or without prejudice.
The suspect remained in custody on $280,000 total bail stemming from four other charges, including felony weapons and drug-dealing offenses. The suspect did not speak in court. Back on April 19, three days after the murder, the cops interviewed him, and he denied any involvement in the murder, according to a police report.
Judge Thompson.
Dearington’s decision dismayed city police who worked on the case and obtained a videotaped account from an eyewitness to the murder.
“We think we have a strong case,” Assistant Police Chief John Velleca said after the court proceeding. “It’s regrettable the state’s attorney doesn’t agree with us. We’re still going to do our best to protect the public and arrest violent offenders.”
The disagreement centered immediately on the sufficiency of eyewitness testimony to support a murder charge. More broadly, the dispute centers on what level of evidence authorities need to arrest alleged violent offenders pending further investigation and bringing a case to trial.
A Pink .38 Named “Bitch”
The police’s case against the suspect rests largely on the eyewitness testimony of Vashun Lewis’s friend, with whom he was hanging out on the day of the murder.
The police have interviewed the witness, who’s 19, five times, according to a report on the investigation prepared Wednesday by Officer Ron Perry under the supervision of Sgt. Tony Reyes. The witness’s story evolved.
Here’s how it happened, according to the report:
Police first arrested him the day of the murder. He denied having seen Vashun Lewis, whom his friends called “V‑Love,” get shot.
They interviewed him again the next day, April 17. The cops had been unable to located Lewis’s bloody clothes. The witness “admitted that he took off Lewis’ clothing inside of 231 Goffe Street after Lewis collapsed. He threw the bloody clothing down the nearby basement stairs.” He further admitted removing a .38 handgun from Lewis’s waistband and putting it first in Lewis’s bedroom, then in a window well. Why had he hidden that information in the first interview? His explanation: “He was trying to protect Lewis and did not want him to be judged negatively.”
In a third interview on April 22, police asked the witness who he thought had killed Lewis. He named the man the police would ultimately arrest months later. He told police that this suspect had taken a Tek‑9 millimeter gun from Lewis. He also said the suspect had taken $200 from Lewis to buy drugs and never returned the money or the drugs.
Four days later, Vashun Lewis was buried. Detectives met up with the witness and his mother at the funeral. They arranged to meet later at the witness’s home. They did; the witness’s grandmother was there. She said her grandson had given her more information. Tell the police what you told me, or I will, she told the witness. He proceeded to describe the gun he had taken from Lewis’s waistband: “a pink .38 Special with the word ‘BITCH’ engraved on it.” Police told the witness he would need to come to police headquarters on another day to make a formal statement about that.
That took place on April 28. The witness took a polygraph test, and the interview was recorded.
In addition to local police, Special Agent Brenda Molloy of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) was there. She interviewed the witness privately for over three hours. She emerged to tell detectives that the witness admitted he’d been with Lewis during the shooting and see who killed him. Detectives showed him a photo array; he allegedly picked out the suspect.
Then he told his story to the cops. He said he and Lewis had been hanging out at Lewis’s Goffe Street apartment that day. Lewis had earlier called the suspect to arrange to meet to get back his borrowed Tek‑9 gun. Lewis and the witness left the house, started walking north. Suddenly the witness heard a voice calling, “Yo.” They turned and saw the suspect “dressed in black pants and a black hooded sweatshirt.” He “jumped out on them with a handgun and pointed at them. [The witness] said he covered his face with his arms and hands and then heard a single gunshot.” He then “started to run back toward 231 Goffe Street but looked back and saw that Lewis was injured. He said he went back to help Lewis walk back to 231 Goffe Street.”
“I’ve been shot,” Lewis said. “I’m gonna die.”
“I love you,” the witness said.
They reached the apartment. The witness “laid Lewis down on the floor and called 911. He then threw Lewis’ blood-stained clothing down the nearby the basement stairs” and “removed the handgun from Lewis waistband and placed it upstairs in Lewis’ bedroom.”
Jurisdictional Tension
Police emerge from a Winchester Avenue home after Tuesday’s search for the suspect.
Local police continued investigating the case in conjunction with Bobby Lawlor (a retired New Haven detective) and Kevin Doyle of the state’s attorney’s office. The two sides clashed about whether to sign a warrant to arrest the suspect — who was continuing to get in trouble with the law.
By this week he had at least four outstanding cases on drugs and weapons and interfering charges, according to the state judicial website.
The cops and the state’s attorney’s office met on Tuesday afternoon — one of the times, according to Dearington’s remarks in court, that state’s attorneys repeated that they wanted more time to study the witness’s testimony. New Haven police decided to go ahead and arrest the suspect, whom they consider a danger to the public, not to mention to the witness. They hit a house on Winchester Avenue where they believe the suspect sometimes sleeps. They didn’t find the suspect. They did find a black Colt .22 caliber handgun hidden under a mattress. Its serial number had been scratched off. A bullet from a .22 had killed Vashun Lewis.
The state’s attorney team and New Haven detectives met again Wednesday afternoon. That’s when, according to Dearington, he said that he would not agree to prosecute the case and that police should not proceed with the arrest. The police insisted they had plenty of probable cause to make the arrest. They went out and, based on a tip, found the suspect on Henry Street and made the arrest.
Underlying the dispute has been a long-running difference of opinion between cops and the state’s attorney’s office.
The state’s attorney’s office feels New Haven police are too quick to make arrests without enough solid evidence to ensure cases hold up in court, and risk violating suspects’ constitutional rights in the process. Dearington’s office came under fire recently when a state judge freed two men from jail who’d been convicted on murder charges, because of the recantation of a witness whose alleged eyewitness testimony formed the main basis for their convictions. (Dearington’s office succeeded in getting one man put back behind bars and is continuing to argue it got the right guys.)
New Haven police argue that probable cause — as opposed to proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which the state must eventually present at trial — is traditionally and should be the standard for arrests, especially involving violent criminals. After an arrest police can continue to gather evidence while a potentially dangerous individual is behind bars.
“To be effective in preserving public safety, the police have to be able to make arrests based on probable cause,” Assistant Chief Velleca argued. He cited a string of court decisions in support of his argument, including Beck v. Ohio, Draper v. United Staties, Brinegar v. United States (”“The ‘quanta of proof ’appropriate in ordinary judicial proceedings are inapplicable to the decision to issue a warrant. Finely tuned standards such as proof beyond a reasonable doubt or by a preponderance of the evidence, useful in formal trials, have no place in the probable-cause decision”), United States v. Watson, Illinois v. Gates, Locke v. United States,
Some on the city question whether a double standard exists for urban and suburban crimes — whether violent crimes involving white victims lead to quicker decisions to apprehend suspects, and whether white eyewitnesses are considered more credible.
Dearington declined to discuss the matter Thursday.
Both he and Assistant Chief Velleca — to the judge and in an interview, respectively — stressed that both sides will continue to work together closely to solve crimes, including this case, and protect public safety. Dearington made a point of praising New Haven detectives’ work in this case.
Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, the suspect’s friends were celebratory about the case’s dismissal. One young woman complained about the arrest: “They messed up his name.”
Vashun Lewis’s family was present in court, too.
An aunt, Marlene Hooks, described Lewis as a “sweet” young man “destined to be a famous boxer one day. I guess he got caught up with the wrong crowd. He was a good good kid.”
Kudos to Attorney Dearington for doing the right thing. He's a lawyer and he's been doing it for a long time. I trust his legal assessment of a case over the New Haven Police Department any day. The officers' argument that the arrest was necessary to keep a violent offender off the street falls short where, as here, the alleged offender is already held on $280,000 bail. This case can still be prosecuted if and when there is sufficient probable cause since it was dismissed without prejudice.