Daryl Valentine Wins His Freedom

In a month or two, Daryl Valentine will leave a Cheshire prison after 32 years of professing his innocence, after the parole board Thursday granted a rare 57-year sentence reduction.

Valentine’s first planned stop: the grave of his grandmother, who died while he was incarcerated, and whose funeral he was not allowed to attend.

The state Board of Pardons and Paroles issued Valentine’s commutation at a remote Microsoft Teams meeting on Thursday afternoon.

The board recommended that Valentine be eligible for release to a halfway home, where he will remain under the Department of Corrections’ supervision until October 2023. The Department of Corrections is expected to follow the board’s recommendation and transport Valentine to the soonest halfway home bed available within a couple of months.

Valentine was convicted for the Sep. 21, 1991, murders of Hury Poole and Andrew Paisley, as well as the injury of Christopher Roach, in a shooting outside the Athenian Diner on Whalley Avenue.

Valentine maintains that he was sitting inside the diner at the time of the shooting and had nothing to do with it. He had been released on furlough from a five-year narcotics-related prison sentence at the time. 

Three eyewitnesses to the shooting who identified Valentine as the perpetrator formed the bedrock of the state’s case. Two of those witnesses recanted their statements three years later, saying that the New Haven police detectives on the case had pressured them to blame Valentine for the crime. The third was Christopher Roach himself, who gave conflicting statements about his ability to remember the day of the crime. (Read an in-depth article about Valentine’s case here.)

The detectives in question, Anthony DiLullo and Joe Greene, have both been implicated in other cases determined in court to have involved wrongful arrests and convictions. Lawyers in a recent habeas trial for the 1994 conviction of Adam Carmon questioned DiLullo’s integrity once again.

Valentine was incarcerated for the Athenian Diner murders at the age of 25. He is now 56 years old.

The parole board’s decision to take 57 years off Valentine’s 100-year sentence was striking, particularly for a murder case, said Valentine’s lawyer, civil rights attorney Alex Taubes, after the hearing. 

“It’s extremely rare what happened,” Taubes said. ​“Fifty-seven years … That is not something you see happen every day. That is definitely not just significant in Connecticut, but nationally.”

“I stand before you today as an innocent man,” Valentine said to the Board at his hearing on Thursday afternoon.

He read from a lengthy handwritten statement. A few sentences in, he paused and wiped his eyes, unable to speak for a moment.

“I’m innocent of this crime,” he repeated softly, off-script, before returning to his notes.

Valentine expressed sorrow for the families of Poole, Paisley, and Roach. ​“No parents should have to bury their child,” he said. That said, he added, ​“I cannot in good conscience take accountability for an act that I am not responsible for.”

Valentine was taking a risk with these statements of innocence. Parole boards often value remorse and acceptance of responsibility from incarcerated people seeking sentence relief. In many states, as reflected in a New Yorker feature on the New York State parole process, people seeking parole or commutations are advised to accept culpability for the crimes that landed them in prison, whether or not they have previously maintained innocence. 

“We’re not here to determine whether you’re guilty or innocent,” said board member Deborah Smith-Palmieri. Rather, she said, the board’s job is to assess Valentine’s rehabilitation process and his potential ​“risk to the community.”

Still, according to Taubes, such a dramatic sentence reduction likely indicates that the board gave some credence to Valentine’s innocence claims. ​“If Mr. Valentine’s case [for his own innocence] was not so strong, I don’t think we would be here today,” he said.

Paisley’s mother had submitted a statement to the board expressing her grief, without advocating for a particular outcome.

“It is up to the board to check his background and verify that he has done what is needed,” she wrote. ​“I am a Christian. We have suffered. Nothing will bring my son back …. I leave it in the Lord’s hands.”

In his presentation before the board, Valentine said that while he is innocent of the shooting for which he was convicted, his time in prison helped him grow and reflect on his time using and selling narcotics as a teenager. He spent his years in prison working in the kitchen; enrolling in courses on anger management, peer advising, and ​“Good Intentions, Bad Choices”; and serving as an unofficial mentor for other incarcerated men. 

“I have mentored guys, keeping them positive,” Valentine told the board. ​“When they get upset about they girl or they want to fight, I try to intervene.. .. They may slip up, but I still try to bring them to a positive way of action.”

His mentees included his son, Daryl Valentine Jr., who was 4 years old when Daryl Sr. first landed in prison. Daryl Jr. wound up at the Cheshire Correctional Institution for a year and a half when he was 27. There, he reconnected with his father. The elder Daryl Valentine taught his son conflict resolution and coping strategies while they served time together, they told the Independent in 2021.

In both New Haven and North Carolina, Valentine has a supportive, close-knit family waiting for him to come home. Daryl Jr. and his wife are planning to welcome Daryl Sr. into their home when he can leave the halfway house. 

His family gave him hope throughout his years in prison, Valentine told the parole board. He has gotten to know his nieces, nephews, and grandchildren through letters, phone calls, and short face-to-face visitations. He remembers the day he met his daughter-in-law: ​“when the officer made the announcement that the visit was over, I was like, ​‘Already?’ ” he recalled.

He’s especially eager to help take care of his mother, who he can tell from a recent photograph has become ​“frail” with age.

When Valentine comes come, he said, ​“my first stop would be to my grandmother’s grave.” Then, he plans to obtain his G.E.D. through night classes, find employment through the Workforce Alliance, become a certified peer mentor, and volunteer with the Boys and Girls Club.

Smith-Palmieri urged Valentine to seek counseling as well, to find ​“someone who can sit with you and help you ease through that transition into the community after 25 years.”

“We want you to be well, physically and mentally,” she added. ​“It’s easy to lose that in that transition.”

Smith-Palmieri was the only board member to share her reasoning for the commutation, which members unanimously supported.

“I’m appreciative and impressed that he managed to still involve himself with all the programming that he did. He looked forward, kept a good attitude, made his best effort to be a part of the community despite the fact that he has a 100 year sentence,” she added. She added that Valentine has ​“tremendous support from the community.”

Valentine cried as Smith-Palmieri spoke.

Meanwhile, Valentine’s younger sister, 52-year-old Tolja Valentine, watched the hearing from work. Tears streamed down her face. 

“It is gonna be amazing to have my big brother back home. It’s been a long 32 years,” Tolja said. She’s helping to plan a welcome home party for when he finally gets out.

When she, Daryl, and their older brother were young, they used to spend all their time together. Daryl was the ​“jokester” of the three. ​“Where you saw one, you saw the other two,” she said. ​“It’ll be good to get back to where we’re all back together again.”